Via Americablog.

If there’s lipstick in your santorum you’re, um, doing it wrong.

Palin appeared at the bar on 20th and Walnut streets last night to shake hands with her fans for about an hour before the first presidential debate. While the crowd inside was friendly, hundreds of people lined the street outside in protest with signs that read things like “Palin is Santorum With Lipstick.”

A few more details from Palin’s visit to a bar in Philadelphia last night…

Palin did not take questions from reporters nor did she talk policy. She posed for pictures and chatted with supporters, many of whom were from outside the city limits, and made an approximately minute-long statement.

And where was Joe Biden last night? Taking questions from reporters.

Did John McCain say Obama was full of “horseshit” on national television?

Incidentally, it was pretty clear to me last night that Obama won the debate, because debates are supposed to be aimed at the people who haven’t really been paying attention up ‘till now. Obama was perfect in this respect: he was calm, direct, clear, and not condescending or angry. The “slam dunk” or “knockout punch” or whatever shitty sports analogy all these commentators are talking about would only serve to make the Democratic base really happy; Obama was appealing to undecideds and independents, and he did so effectively. Unless you’re given a clear and simple and guaranteed “Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine” kind of opening, it’s best to be solid, not splashy. All McCain had was talk of Reagan and the KGB and past glories. That works for Republican primary debates, but presidential debates are about what you will do, or what you’ve done for us lately.

That said, I still donated to the Obama camp last night, and you should too. You get a free t-shirt if you donate more than thirty bucks.

Film

Couch Fest

• See what else is happening in Film on Saturday »

Decibel Festival

Carl Craig

• See what else is happening in Music on Saturday »

Slog commenter Ed writes this about our debate liveblog from last night:

After reading all of the polls this morning, pretty much all declaring Obama certainly the winner, if not a pretty clear winner, can we all now agree that you guys know nothing about how “average” Americans are going to view anything? Particularly how they view a debate?

You know, Ed, I’m almost ready to admit that. I want to see a few more post-debate polls before I completely discard the way I was viewing last night’s debate, but for the moment: Yes, it seems like those of us who thought Obama wasn’t tough enough were completely wrong.

First, the polls I believe Ed is talking about:

A CNN snap poll right after the debate found Obama way ahead of McCain on key measures:

• Was more intelligent: Obama 55%, McCain 30%

• Expressed his views more clearly: Obama 53%, McCain 36%

• Spent more time attacking his opponent: McCain 60%, Obama 23%

• Was more sincere and authentic: Obama 46%, McCain 38%

• Seemed to be the stronger leader: Obama 49%, McCain 43%

• Was more likeable: Obama 61%, McCain 26%

And a CBS poll found similar results among undecided voters. With them, Obama won by a huge 15-point margin.

And, on top of that, check out the reactions of people in this Fox News focus group. Even they gave Obama the win:

For what it’s worth, we here at the Slog were not alone in failing to realize how well Obama was doing.

But that’s probably not worth much.

So, with the caveat that the CNN and CBS polls are snap polls, and that further polling could show something different, it’s obviously time to ask: What happened? Are we crazy?

I think Ben Smith provided a good first answer last night, blogging from the press file room at the debate:

The mild consensus in the press file was that McCain won, if not in particularly dramatic fashion. The two insta-polls out — from CBS and CNN — found the opposite: That Obama won by a wide margin. CBS had it 39% to 25% for Obama, CNN 51% to 38%.

Maybe the difference was expectations. People covering the campaigns think of Obama as a much-improved debater, and McCain as at times a weak one. McCain, by that standard, overperformed. But people tuning into the race now now think of McCain as an experienced hand, and Obama as a newcomer. Obama more than held his own, and McCain failed to expose him — as he tried — as out of his depth.

Yes, to the different expectations.

And here are two other theories I have on my brain at the moment:

1) People covering the campaign, or watching it closely over the last 20 or so months, have had a long time to get used to watching an African-American make a credible run for the presidency. That part is old news to us. But for people just tuning in, it’s not. Check out the surprise of some of the viewers in Fox’s focus group—Obama is “very articulate,” he “seemed to know what he was doing,” he “seemed to care.” All of those reactions suggest very low expectations for Obama on those scores. Now, really, the only way you can think that Obama isn’t articulate or on top of the issues is if you haven’t been watching and/or have certain assumptions about African-American leaders. Obama won over doubters last night, and many of them probably had unspoken, inchoate, and maybe even blatantly prejudiced concerns about a black man leading them. The press has moved beyond the race question for the most part, but my guess is that’s a huge mistake. For Americans just tuning in, the debates are the moment when they try on the historic idea of this African-American leading the country. Apparently, many find it not as bad as they thought.

2) PTSD. Or, maybe PTKLD. (Post-traumatic Kerry Loss Disorder.) My guess is that liberals who watched the debate through the lens of the last eight years wanted Obama to completely destroy McCain (and their memories of wimpy Democratic candidates, and their fears about how this election will go). Clearly, he didn’t need to do that to win. In fact, based on the insta-poll reactions, too much forcefulness and aggression from Obama would probably have been a mistake.

So, to return to Ed’s question: Am I ready to declare that I’m out of touch with the average American? Almost. I want to see a few more polls, but yeah, I’m almost ready.

But: Really, I’ve never thought that I view the election like an average American. Most normal (and sane) people don’t spend as much time following the race as I do. It’s always a trick to figure out how “average” people will react to things, and if anyone had that answer definitively, he or she would be making a killing in campaign consulting fees (and not, say, blogging on a Saturday morning). What these polls are suggesting to me is that the average American—or, probably more accurately, the average undecided America—is way more average that I was thinking.

UPDATE: Or… maybe we here at the Slog are just way more in touch with the mindset of Washington State voters—who, apparently, think McCain won.

It didn’t make it up in time for This Weekend at the Movies yesterday, but if anyone is wondering about Spike Lee’s new WWII drama Miracle at St. Anna, you can now read Charles Mudede’s review here:

The pre–civil rights black American soldier is the ultimate contradiction. And Spike Lee is well aware of this; he knows that the men in his new film, four black American soldiers in Italy at the end of World War II, are caught in a complex web of contradictions: black Americans in white Europe, black Americans battling racist Germans for their racist American government. And then there are all of those lonely and lovely white ladies in the Italian villages. Good lord, how can a brother keep his head straight in this most trying of situations?

We have an open mic and three readings today.

First, at Seattle Mystery Bookshop, Ann Littlewood reads from Night Kill, which is about a woman accused of murder by lion. There was never a Murder, She Wrote about that, I bet.

Up at Third Place Books, John Robison reads from Look Me in the Eye. That book is his memoir about growing up with Asperger’s. It’s also a memoir about growing up as Augusten Burroughs’ brother.

And at Elliott Bay Book Company, Emily Warn reads from Shadow Architect, her most recent book of poems. I think that Warn is a beautiful poet. Here is a link to a page that features her reading one of her poems aloud. You should go to this.

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

Says Slog tipper Reggie…

I had a dream last night where I was talking to Obama. It seemed very surreal. We were in a diner talking to each other for a few minutes about the debate and a couple of other things. You should ask the Slog asking people whether they have dreams about Obama too. My roommate has them and other friends have had them. Before Obama came into the picture politically, I’ve never had a dream about any politician. Since then, I’ve had at least 3-4 of these dreams.

I’ve had dreams about the Queen of England. Never Obama. You?

…is dead.

The future is here:

Hello all. At this moment John McCain and Barack Obama are in Oxford, Mississippi, just a half hour away from their first head-to-head debate, and your Stranger debate captains for the night—Erica C. Barnett, Dan Savage, and yours truly—are here online, ready to talk you through all the angst and argument and political garbage. Let’s begin.

Drinking game rules are below. And most of you know how this liveblogging widget works, but in case you’re new: Drop your comments into the widget window and we’ll post them if they’re worthy.

Yesterday we asked the Sloggosphere for insight on this not-so-elusive voter, and a few of their stories are below.

Folks fear Palin but tolerate Obama. Some think Rossi is a straight-shootin’, calm guy, while Gregoire is feckless and reactionary. While these anecdotes give some insight to individuals, they don’t fully identify common threads among this slice of the electorate. My theory is many of Obama-Rossi voters are middle-aged male swing Democrats from the exurbs who want roads, but think Republicans are hurting the national economy. But we can’t be sure. I’ve got calls in to pollsters and will report back.

In the meantime, he are some tidbits from readers on how they reconcile the candidates’ conflict on issues—between a man who wants to decide what happens in a woman’s uterus to a Democrats with a 100-percent rating from NARAL—on a single ballot.

A woman, who asks to be known as Winston, on abortion and asphalt:

I’m voting for a split ticket. I believe Obama believes what he says, and will attempt to bring some kind of rational mindset back to the Presidency. As for Rossi, I voted Kerry/Rossi four years ago. I’ve worked with both Rossi and Gregoire on and off over the years and my experiences with them are significantly different. Gregoire has made statements to me, then turned and did the opposite two separate times - a disconcerting act for someone whom I greatly admired as AG. Rossi has consistently been straight with me: when he agreed with me, he agreed. When he disagreed, he stayed on point. No empty promises or lip service.

Choice issues on a state level are irrelevant. Not only was the right to choose confirmed by voters 20 years ago via initiative, but the essentially super majorities in the state House and Senate would prevent any kind of repeal legislation from even getting a hearing. On the federal level, however, choice is a real issue, and genuinely threatened. Obama would pick a Supreme Court justice to protect our right.

On Iraq, I opposed the war, and believe we should have finished the work in Afganistan FIRST. Now that we’re there and have dismantled the country, we have to finish the mess we’ve created. I believe Obama will actually move toward that local control we’ve all been hoping for.

As for roads, we need them. Commerce cannot move by bus. I do support lightrail with the hope that the system will allow us to move those buses to other, underserved areas that need transit. Lightrail only works if you get people to the depot. We will always need highways and rail lines to move product. 1000’s of grocery stores receive product in this state by 7 a.m. each day. Painters, vendors, school kids on buses - they’ve all got places to go each morning.

Luke Renner on loving a gay son and loving the real estate market:

My folks are voting for Obama and not for Gregoire.

My mom is afraid McCain will die in office and thinks Palin is a fucking idiot.

My dad’s a Republican and said he didn’t really believe in Obama, but he admitted the Democrats are much better on gay rights and he said that I - his gay son - matter more to him than any of the candidates. My mother, of course, immediately naysayed and warned him not to make promises he couldn’t keep, but… he’s never said anything like that before and I, for one, believe him.

Of course, it’s the states that are more responsible for many rights currently not afforded to my people, but it’ll be impossible to prevent them from voting for Rossi. Both are in Real Estate and they think he’s going to make them money.

Losing sports teams, tight ends, and registering voters who destest Gregoire after the jump.

Continue reading "About Those Obama-Rossi Voters" »

Created by you, our politically savvy (and, it appears, spectacularly boozy) readers. One hour to go before the debate. Get ready…

Drink every time:

• McCain flashes that creepy grimace/smile.

• Obama says, “Now, listen.”

• McCain refers to himself as a maverick.

• Barack Obama says “What you need to understand is…” or “The important thing to remember is that…” or “What these people don’t realize is that…”

• John McCain mentions “change.”

• McCain looks as if he expects (but doesn’t get) applause for something he just said.

• Obama gets applause for saying something that normally wouldn’t deserve applause.

Take a shot whenever:

• McCain talks about his POW status.

• Obama says “multi-task.”

• Hillary Clinton’s name is spoken (by any of the three).

• Obama mentions God. (Congrats, you’re the designated driver.)

Finish drink and pour two more if:

• Anyone says “the fundamentals of our economy are strong.”

• John McCain tries to move his arms above his shoulders.

Do a line if:

• Obama refers to past drug use and calls it “bitchin’.”

Put on lipstick and kiss your dog if:

• The pitbull/lipstick/hockey mom thing is mentioned.

Earlier today, the apparent owner of Seahawkshuddle.com threw up a classy post on his site in anticipation of next week’s Hawks/Giants game titled ” Welcome Giants fans: Wednesday’s Jokes of the Day!”

It looked like this:

and contained oh-so-classy 9/11 jokes like these:

Q: What was the last thing going through Mr. Jones’ head when he was working on the World Trade Center’s 90th floor? A: The 91st floor.

Q: What’s the last thing that went through the minds of the 9/11 jumpers?
A: Their ankles.

Q: What is the New York City Fire Department’s favorite song?
A: “It’s Raining Men”

Q: What’s Al Qaida’s favorite football team?
A: The New York Jets

The Internets went crazy and the story ended up on the Deadspin sports blog and in the New York Daily News. Meanwhile, Giants fans have tracked down the site owner and are undoubtedly on their way over to his house with torches and pitchforks.

The original Seahawkshuddle post has been taken down but can be found in Google’s cache here.

What a dick.

Google, Google, Google. I was mad at you for making such a shitty-looking first phone, but I can never stay mad at you for long.

…when Proposition 8 appeared on the California ballot, it was an unlikely question for Google to take an official company position on.

However, while there are many objections to this proposition — further government encroachment on personal lives, ambiguously written text — it is the chilling and discriminatory effect of the proposition on many of our employees that brings Google to publicly oppose Proposition 8. While we respect the strongly-held beliefs that people have on both sides of this argument, we see this fundamentally as an issue of equality. We hope that California voters will vote no on Proposition 8 — we should not eliminate anyone’s fundamental rights, whatever their sexuality, to marry the person they love.

I love you, Google.

Jeff does—required viewing!

Due to a schedule conflict and a lack of cable, I missed last night’s debate between Dino Rossi and Gov. Christine Gregoire in Blaine, but Josh (AKA the Competition, nee the Boss) was there (word is he stayed in a SWANK hotel), and he blogged about it for Horse’s Ass this morning.

Josh focuses in his post on the debate over the minimum wage (a Rossi-supporting convenience store clerk he talked to is “pissed” that Rossi opposes Washington State’s inflation-indexed minimum wage), but the thing that jumped out at me from the coverage of last night was this: Gregoire, who has bent over backwards to differentiate herself on “values” from “George W. Bush Republican” Rossi, vowed not to fund a paid family leave program passed by the legislature, a response to the projected $3.2 billion budget deficit. That program has been a major priority for Democratic legislators; targeting it as a cost-cutting measure smacks of pandering to exactly wrong audience.

The next Rossi-Gregoire debate will be on Wednesday, October 1, at 7:00 pm; it will air on PBS affiliates.

Richard Green, Imperial Wizard of the Mississippi White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, says that the KKK will be attending to tonight’s presidential debate at the University of Mississippi. But rest easy, Obama supporters! Green promises that the Klan isn’t coming to make “a big hoopla” or anything.

The Klan will, however, have pamphlets and membership applications on hand for any audience members who happen to share the Klansmen’s views. Some examples of those views: Obama’s election “could be the destruction of America,” says Greene, who states categorically that he would not vote for a black candidate.

More here.

Hello! Sorry about the yelling earlier. I can’t stay mad at you guys.

Opening this week, regardless of temperature:

I liked the quiet and angry XXY: “Alex’s fierce, battered confidence in the rightness of her own body; her father’s heartbreaking pronoun confusion; and XXY’s gentle refusal to judge anyone’s choices (or, more importantly, to force choice on anyone) make it a powerful—and refreshingly sensitive—lesson on modern gender.”

Paul Constant calls Choke “an inept, poorly made movie for die-hard Palahniuk fans only.”

But he liked Humboldt County slightly better: “Though three-quarters of the film’s characters make their living solely from the cultivation of marijuana, there isn’t even one fusty pot pun in the whole movie.”

Charles Mudede details Year of the Fish’s many failures: “Seeing the exploitation of the teenager indirectly (through the thick and colorful lens of a fairy tale—the Chinese version of the Cinderella story) distorts the reality to such an extent that the serious elements (sex slavery, sweatshops, urban loneliness) cannot be taken seriously. What one wants to see instead is an unforgiving, unremitting, and undistorted indictment of global capitalism—a monster that makes life impossible for billions of people every day.”

I am here to tell you that The Lucky Ones is weird and dumb: “Daring to ask the question, “What would happen if three tired movie clichés had post-traumatic stress disorder?” the film seems to be based entirely on some screenwriter’s precious bon mot: They survived Iraq, but how will they survive on the battleground OF AMERICAN LIFE?!”

And Megan Seling would have enjoyed Eagle Eye, if real life weren’t so goddamned scary already: “Any other day, I’d watch it, eat my popcorn, cheer for the good guy, and be done with it. But given my current state of paranoia, I left the theater scared shitless that my cell phone was going to ring and it’d be Dick Cheney trying to ‘activate’ me.”

In Concessions, I wrote about some stupid straight-to-DVD shit.

And in Limited Runs:

Couch Fest Films sounds like fun (see our Suggests page). Northwest Film Forum is hosting the Decibel Festival Optical Multimedia Showcase tonight and tomorrow; Jasper Johns something-or-other Painters Painting starting on Sunday; and, as per usual, the totally fun Sprocket Society Secret Sunday Matinee. Central Cinema has, like, five straight nights of Dirty Dancing. I Vitelloni and Mafioso are playing at SIFF Cinema as part of Festa Italiana; also at SIFF Cinema, Still Life. Late nights are The Host (Egyptian) and Repo Man (Grand Illusion). The Grand Illusion also has The Corporal’s Diary, a war documentary. And all weekend long it’s the Tasveer Independent South Asian Film Festival at Broadway Performance Hall.

Ta-daaah! Have a lovely weekend, everyone.
Don’t forget that you can comment on articles!

Update: And, of course, there’s the Port Townsend Film Festival going on all weekend in uber-lovely Port Townsend.

I’m not saying anything but…

…isn’t that Sarah Brown? You know, the spouse of Gordon Brown, the current Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. I’m not saying anything but isn’t he 57 and his lady 44? As for Tyson Beckford, the model with the muscles, isn’t he 37? Believe me, I’m saying nothing at all.

The 19-year-old man arrested following Wednesday night’s shooting in Maple Leaf will be released as police continue to investigate the case.

The 19-year-old man, who is an art and design student in Seattle, is suspected of shooting a 21-year-old man outside of the North Manor apartment complex in the 9700 block of 5th Ave NE just before 7pm Wednesday night. Police recovered a rifle at the scene.

According to the Seattle Times, the shooting may have stemmed from a car prowl. A 2001 Toyota Camry is registered to the 19-year-old man.

Earlier this afternoon Barack texted me (and you and everyone he knows) saying people should watch the debate on CNN. Looks like that got him into a little bit of trouble. Here’s the new text I just received from Barack:

Watch Barack debate John McCain tonight at 9 pm ET on any of the major networks or cable. Fwd this msg & remind friends to register to vote at VoteForChange.com.

Oops!

“Here are two questions my law partner came up with that I very much like,” writes Slog tipper Bob. “Please get Gwen Ifill or whomever it is to ask these—you can do that, right?”

1. To Sen. Obama: Would the nation be better off today if Senator McCain rather than George Bush had won the nomination and Presidency in 2000?

2. To Sen. McCain: Would the nation be better off today if Al Gore rather than George Bush had won the Presidency in 2000?

These are great questions—and I’m certain Gwen reads Slog, Bob, and I’m confident that she’ll feel the same way, and put these to the candidates.

I wrote to you a while ago—I’m the first letter in this column—about dealing with being out in a crappy little school, in a crappy little town. You helped a lot and I kept in mind much of what you said on bad days. I thought you might like an update: tomorrow I’m starting university—great course, big city, high queer population. I have officially escaped, and I’m just about to start that better life you talked about. (I would ask advice about making friends, but I already have this whole plan of look hot and be drunk, which is pretty comprehensive.) The icing on the cake is knowing most of the fuckers who made the last year so shitty screwed up their A levels or just plain don’t have enough aspiration in them to even want to have any kind of interesting life. Actually no; that’s a petty and vindictive and gets nowhere near my collegey goodness cake—thoughts like that are left behind as of tomorrow.

The important thing is that months after getting cast out, I’m finally able to fucking leave, and I couldn’t be happier. I hope if I ever have cause to write to you again, it’ll be about some sweaty kinky fun.

No Longer ‘Tired And Losing It’

Thanks for the update, NLTALI, it made my day.

Or, at least, prominent conservative and syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker of the National Review. Today she calls on Sarah Palin to drop out of the race:

It was fun while it lasted.

Palin’s recent interviews with Charles Gibson, Sean Hannity, and now Katie Couric have all revealed an attractive, earnest, confident candidate. Who Is Clearly Out Of Her League.

No one hates saying that more than I do. Like so many women, I’ve been pulling for Palin, wishing her the best, hoping she will perform brilliantly. I’ve also noticed that I watch her interviews with the held breath of an anxious parent, my finger poised over the mute button in case it gets too painful. Unfortunately, it often does. My cringe reflex is exhausted…

If BS were currency, Palin could bail out Wall Street herself…

What to do?

McCain can’t repudiate his choice for running mate. He not only risks the wrath of the GOP’s unforgiving base, but he invites others to second-guess his executive decision-making ability. Barack Obama faces the same problem with Biden.

Only Palin can save McCain, her party, and the country she loves. She can bow out for personal reasons, perhaps because she wants to spend more time with her newborn. No one would criticize a mother who puts her family first.

Do it for your country.

Listen, people. Two weeks ago (after I heard the weather would reach 86 degrees) I opened up “This Weekend at the Movies” with the gentle suggestion that the overheated could enjoy themselves in air-conditioned theaters. Then you got all aggro on me:

Air conditioned theaters? It’s 75 degrees outside. Folks need to be outside now; the remaining 10 months of the year when it’s 45 and drizzly they can park their big butts in a theater seat and watch a movie.
Posted by Sargon Bighorn | September 12, 2008 8:38 PM

The weather is perfect. This is the weather I crossed half the country to find. We walked twice as far today because we didn’t have any of that spring-break, titty-flashing sun beating down on us. Back when it was all freaking hot I wanted to be inside an air conditioned movie theater, but now? Now outdoors in Seattle is the only place to be.

If you don’t love overcast weather, you’re crazy to be paying the fortune it costs to live in this market. There a a million sunny places with cheap housing, you know.
Posted by elenchos | September 19, 2008 5:50 PM

The real “This Weekend at the Movies” coming shortly.

Love,
Lindy

As long as we’re talking financial collapse and government bailouts and whether or not D.C. needs Senator McCain in a moment of economic crisis:

^{Thanks to Sullivan, who posted from Huffington, who probably paid some college intern in drink tickets—at tonight’s debate party—to find the footage. So thanks, soon-to-be-drunk college intern!}

Alaska doesn’t seem to be a—um, how do you say?—culture of ideas. Has any writer/thinker/artist of distinction ever come from Alaska?

UPDATE: Brendan Kiley was born in Alaska. The question stands.

UPDATE 2: Jen posted about this yesterday. (Not even The Stranger’s own staff can keep up with Slog.)

No one at the Stranger—judging from the lack of posts about the subject—really seems to give a flying fuck about Nickelsville. This despite the fact that we may all be homeless soon.

Discuss.

Dino Rossi and other Republicans may list “GOP” as their party preference on general-election ballots, King County Superior Court Judge Richard Eadie announced this morning. Democrats had sued the Washington Secretary of State, which oversees elections, requesting an emergency order to stop printing ballots because the GOP label was deceptive.

A poll by Elway Research in June found that 25 percent of the state’s voters didn’t know GOP means Republican. And more recently the opinion research firm reported that Rossi gained 6 percent when he used the “GOP” label instead of “Republican.”

“They are trying to steal the fucking election,” says Dwight Pelz, chair for the Washington State Democratic Party. He says that in addition to Rossi, 22 legislative candidates have filed this year using the GOP label, which obscures their political leanings and benefits Republicans. “We find that when we identify candidates as Democrats, they get more votes.” The Republican name “is toxic,” says Pelz.

Eadie ruled that the “GOP” and other non-traditional party preferences could remain mostly for logistical reasons. Revising ballots would burden county elections offices and potentially disrupt the election because there are only about 40 days remaining until polls close.

Dave Ammons, a spokesman for the Washington Secretary of State, says King County has already printed 200,000 ballots and other counties have have already mailed military and oversees ballots. “In a sense, the election is underway already,” he says. He also says the judge decided labels on ballots must remain consistent with those on ballots in the primary election in August.

Since courts struck down Washington’s blanket primary, which forwarded one candidate from each leading party to the general election, and the state implemented a top-two primary system, candidates can list their party preference any way they like. Sam Reed, Secretary of State, said in a statement today, “This ruling again underscores that the new system is driven by and for the voters, not the political parties, and we couldn’t be happier with the outcome,”

But the “new system” clearly benefits Republicans. The state Washington State Republican Party—which doesn’t call itself the GOP party, ahem—even joined the state’s legal defense.

Pelz says state Democrats will go to the legislature in the 2009 session to “try to get them to close this loophole of deception.” If that fails, he says, the they will sue the state again next year.

Back out of a debate he’s convinced he’s going to lose? John McCain has done it before.

Another news story to toss in the faces of people who insist that marriage equality for same-sex couples is an attack on religion:

Proposition 8 is stirring great fervor this election season, as supporters and opponents of gay marriage gear up for their Nov. 4 duel at the ballot box. Now comes the latest group to weigh in—the Board of Rabbis of Southern California.

The board—a collection of leaders from the Reconstructionist, Reform, Conservative and Orthodox movements—this week declared its opposition to the measure, which would amend the California Constitution to define marriage as only between a man and a woman. Leaders of the board said they wanted protect the civil rights of gay and lesbian couples…. The board has more than 290 members. Roughly 120 took part in Wednesday’s vote, the largest number of rabbis to weigh in on such an issue in recent memory. Vogel said Friday that 93% of those who cast votes supported the resolution.

California’s “six most senior Episcopal bishops” are also urging a “no” vote on Prop 8.

From a text message I just received from Barack:

Watch Barack debate John McCain tonight at 9 pm Eastern on CNN. Also, remind friends to register to vote at VoteForChange.com. Please forward this message.

Barack Obama: bringing peace to the remote control wars since 2008.

It took this long for video from the 1984 Miss Alaska Pageant to surface? Or did I miss it earlier? In any case, here it is, via Sullivan (and with a 50-second intro by some guy in Juneau who apparently keeps VHS tapes of such things). UPDATE: That first video was removed, so I’ve swapped it out with a new one:

Did you see this? It’s great.

Someone turn on the bat signal. We need help.

In an email with the subject “Metaphors for Capitalism - Illustration #1,” Matt Sussman “presented me with a beautiful present” (if I may borrow a few words from a standard translation of the Old Testament):

BLOODTHIRSTY shark fights in one of the world’s biggest aquariums are threatening the opening celebrations of a new Dubai shopping centre.

Razor-toothed Sand Tiger sharks have killed at least 40 smaller reef sharks and have been aggressive towards divers working on final preparations in the giant tank.

The ten million-litre aquarium features the world’s largest school of sharks and is the centrepiece of the new 5.9million sq ft Burj Dubai Mall.

Many of you are experts in both politics and boozing. So how about you help us with our debate drinking game and finish the following sentences in the comments?

First, a reminder of tonight’s cast of characters: Barack Obama, John McCain, and Jim Lehrer.

And now, the sentences:

Drink every time…

Take a shot whenever…

Finish drink and pour two more if…

^{And, you know, if you have other sentences you want to finish, go crazy. We’ll take the best of these and make them into our Official Stranger Debate Drinking Game™, which will be released just before our big debate liveblog.}

If you need an LED processor and you are a person anywhere in the world, I am sorry.

The world is out of LED processors right now.

This I heard from a man who needs them to finish an artwork at Harborview Medical Center, where the new building at Ninth and Jefferson is having an art opening next Thursday.

Slog reader Brian writes:

Does SLOG know of good places to watch debates (& drink)? if so it’d be a great slog entry! I know there must be some bars that are going to turn off the jukebox and turn full attention to the debates while others, many others, will be all like, ah who cares, and play sports and music or nothing instead. But I’m not in the know of good places to go for watching the debate tonight at 6.

Fear not, we are in the know. In addition to preparing for our big debate liveblog (featuring Dan Savage, Erica Barnett, and myself), I’ve also been putting together a list of places where you can go to watch the debate (preferably with your laptop so you can participate in our liveblog as well).

The full list in the jump. If you’re throwing a public party and want to add it, just email me and I’ll put your party on the list, too.

Among the party people and party places that you’ll find more information about when this blog post continues:

Galaxy Theater (Gig Harbor); Spitfire; Michele Frix (Renton); various Obama house parties around the state; Neighbours; Cafe Metropolitan; Cafe Presse; Twilight Exit; The Bottleneck Lounge; Tini Bigs & Hula Hula’s; the Columbia City Theater; Moe Bar; and various bars and restaurants and community centers from Spokane to Olympia.

Continue reading "The Stranger's Debate Party List" »

Sometimes you’ve gone to every single election page you can think of and there’s no updates at all, and nothing new to look at. Well, fuck that shit: Twitter now has an election page.

It’s totally useless, but it updates like 900 times a minute.

The people who really dislike this bailout are starting to speak out. John Washburn at The Brad Blog thinks Paulson’s plan could allow Paulson to buy Microsoft for a buck? (Thank you to slog tipper, Jeremy.) I’m not entirely convinced.

A financially savvy slog reader made the following point to me in an email:

The point of the bailout was to inject liquidity back in the market, which was supposed to have occurred after people had confidence in their banks again. That’s not going to happen. We do already have a much better method of injecting that liquidity directly though, and I feel dumb for not having thought of it before: the Small Business Administration.

Let’s stick with the $700 billion number. $500 billion in loans for any business with 100 or fewer employees that wants to expand. If you’ve been profitable three out of the past five years, guaranteed approval up to $1 million. $200 billion for startups, normal (meaning 1990s normal) application standards apply.

If we buy bad debt, it means that there’s one step with no multiplier effect. Really, it’ll mean smaller writedowns for the banks, so they may go all conservative and not lend at all, so their books look even better. If we give it directly to the small businesses, it’s got a multiplier immediately, since it’s going into the banks as actual deposits, that then get spent on equipment, buildings, supplies and so on. Cuts out the fat cats altogether, gets liquidity back in the market, indirectly helps the banks, and is guaranteed to create millions of jobs.

It’s a great point. Allow me to attempt to translate this to plainer language:

Let’s say you have an extra four thousand dollars available to you. (How? You’re a Stranger reader, and thus have a completely reliable, irrefutable source of financial advice upon which to draw. We brought down WaMu. We can make you rich!)

You want to help the economy get back on it’s feet. So, you’re going to lend out this money to help one of your friends who is struggling, giving out a no interest loan that can be paid back at leisure.

Two friends come to mind.

One guy took out a home equity loan at the peak of the bubble, and spent the money on a bunch of get-rich-quick schemes—like buying up the original iPhones to flip on ebay. He’s lost about a quarter of what he borrowed when these schemes failed. His original plan was to pay back the loan by selling his house, but then the bubble popped and his house is worth about 20% less. He needs your money to pay back the difference he now owes on his home equity loan.

A gal you know has opened a small but thriving bakery on Broadway. She needs a little cash to buy a new commercial mixer—to keep up with demand. But the banks aren’t lending money to “risky” small businesses anymore. With your four thousand dollars, she could buy the mixer, hire a person to run it each morning and grow her business.

Which is the better choice, for the economy as a whole? Let’s follow the money.

If you give the money to your guy friend, he will indeed pay off his loan. The bank will take his money and, most likely, keep it. The banks are really sweating things now and are hoarding cash. Rather than lending out your guy friend’s money, they’ll probably keep most of it as cash. The impact on the economy stops with the money sitting around in an ATM, waiting to be withdrawn in the next panic.

Give the money to your gal friend, and she’ll go out and spend it on a new mixer, plus start paying a new salary to an employee to work the mixer. Her employee with spend part of her paycheck around town, helping many other businesses. The mixer company can, in turn, spend your money on employee salaries. The employees of the mixer company will probably save some of their salaries, but spend most of it. The places where these employees spend their money will in turn spend the income. This multiplier effect makes your four thousand dollar initial investment have an impact of many thousands of dollars.

Go with the gal and her bakery. The Federal government should do the same.

Dan, no butt dimples for me. What I want most is the back of a beautiful neck…

So smooth, so slender. It’s like the stem of a lily.

Especially for a corporate tower: pretty good. I especially liked its thin skin and small parts. It was light. Everything about it was waferly, not too hard or too thick, just flying upward. Now when I look at it I think about the evacuation of the regular-folks side of the business, the part that dealt in things like single, thin, waferly dollar bills. The building looks like stacks of bills to me. I think about them all just flying away.

^{(Image from here.)}

The other thing that is remarkable about this photograph, besides the way it depicts what now feels like the irresponsible airiness of the building, is that the old Washington Mutual Tower is reflected on its side. That old 1980s building is a hefty thing, stocky and packed with heavy-handed references to history. It’s not a good building. But it has the sort of reassuring sturdiness I wish I could believe in again when it comes to banking. That was always an illusion, I guess. The new building was, unfortunately, more honest.

Philip¹, who works in the Washington Mutual tower downtown, says his first instant message of the day came from a co-worker:

Woo-hoo?

All the Washington Mutual employees received an email announcing the buyout last night², giving people time to freak out in the privacy of their own homes before coming to work.

“Most everybody’s been resigned for weeks that something like this would happen,” Philip says. “Some people are working, others are slacking off, people taking extra-long coffee breaks together, joking around.”

The most popular jokes in the Washington Mutual tower this morning:

As people arrived: “Welcome to J.P. Chase!”

Intermittently, as people pass each other: “It feels good working here!” and “I like this new office!”

Regarding a branding campaign—”fair, caring, human, dynamic, and driven!”—that Washington Mutual employees had beaten into their skulls a few years ago: “Do we still have to ‘live the brand’?”

Philip, who works as a low-level compliance analyst, says he wouldn’t mind being laid off. “But some of the older people,” he says, “are looking pretty nervous. I haven’t seen anybody crying. Not in my department.”

The only material difference in the office, Philip says, is that they finally took down a portrait of Kerry Killinger—Washington Mutual’s CEO, ousted earlier this month—and replaced it with a picture of an abacus.

“None of us,” he says, “have any idea what’s going to happen.”

¹Not his real name.

² Full text of the “we’ve just been bought out but don’t you worry!” email below the jump.

Continue reading "Inside WaMu" »

(If it ever was.)

This week is a total disaster, politics-wise, for John McCain. Maybe he’ll blow everyone’s mind at the debate tonight and as a result his strange gambits over the last few days will be forgotten. But I doubt that.

Let’s review, briefly.

McCain began the week with his standing in the polls sinking, the economy imploding, and Sarah Palin continuing to give embarrasing interviews (and, for the most part, not giving public interviews, which was also embarrassing). On Wednesday, trying to get the spotlight back on himself and attempting to appear presidential and above politics, McCain announced he would be suspending his campaign and heading back to D.C. to help push an economic rescue plan through, and that he would not be attending the presidential debate on Friday if the economy wasn’t saved by then.

That’s quite a marker to throw down. And if you do that, you better be thinking several steps ahead about possible moves by your opponents. But it seems like McCain wasn’t.

First, Obama gave a press conference in Florida announcing that he believed the debate should go on, and saying, essentially, that a president needs to be able to multi-task. He also warned that injecting presidential politics into complex economic negotiations in D.C. could be a bad idea.

Then, when McCain landed in D.C., it turned out that lawmakers were already close to an economic bailout deal. Without him. Then, at a big White House meeting that McCain appears to have requested, the deal fell apart. (Who predicted that?)

Then, today, still with no deal, McCain put his tail between his legs, reversed himself, and put out a statement saying he would be at the debate despite the little progress being made.

Thats a total reversal, and again, a total disaster.

McCain, through a series of impulsive decisions, has managed this week to set traps for himself and give Obama an opportunity to look calm, deliberative, multi-tasky, and presidential. At the same time, McCain has left a lot of people with the impression that all he does is create an atmosphere of utter confusion around himself—an atmosphere that impedes real progress.

I don’t know how much of this week’s machinations will filter through to the general public. And, of course, more drama at the debate could sweep all of this out of the media spotlight. But if this week enters the collective consciousness as an object lesson in how McCain would run the country, then McCain is toast.

Nicolai Ourousoff says Brad Cloepfil has become part of the aggressive sanitation crew in New York City.

Meanwhile in Seattle, the building Cloepfil adapted—Robert Venturi’s pomo-deco Seattle Art Museum; these impossible collage projects make Cloepfil seem like a glutton for punishment!—is attached to the WaMu tower (designed by other architects), where a certain cleaning-out of its own is taking place…

Music

The Cave Singers

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

Yesterday it was sexy armpit day, today it’s…

…what are those dimples called, anyway? Those lower-back/above-the-ass-cheeks/either-side-of-the-spine dimples? Is there a name for them? Whatever they’re called, they’re today’s body part. Click on the image above for the full shot.

Your move, Charles.

You should be too!

After the week it’s been, tonight’s debate is sure to be AWESOME.

Obama has so much ammo with McCain’s “suspended campaign” bullshit. I can’t wait to hear what he’ll say. I’m also looking forward to watching McCain, who’s apparently really confused right now, babble through the answers the same way he babbled through his protest-ridden speech at the RNC.

This is gonna be great.

Texas:

Police: Pastor sent child pornography from church

After his arrest in connection to a child pornography case, Pastor Steve Richardson appeared in court for the first time Thursday in downtown Dallas…. Now, federal investigators say the 36-year-old pastor used the church’s office computer for child pornography.

According to court documents, Richardson, under the user name “cowboysspades,” sent dozens of pictures of girls under the age 10, including infants, engaging in sexually explicit conduct.

Richardson was busted after he allegedly sent images to an undercover federal agent, who used another child pornography suspect’s identity, authorities said. Graphic online chats between Richardson and the agent are documented in the criminal complaint.

The court documents report when Richardson, under the user name cowboysspades, asked “Vlad,” the undercover agent, about a child’s age, he stated “even more awesome” when the agent responded four.

“Yeah, such a cute age,” the agent responded.

“You ever doing anything with her?” cowboysspades asked.

Remember, kids, there is no morality without religion.

The (brief) pool report from McCain’s plane ride to the debate.

I don’t have much of a connection to Washington Mutual. My first savings account was at Seafirst (Wedgwood Branch!) and when they transitioned into Bank of America, so did I. So when it comes to personal WaMu-related anecdotes, I got nothin’ (aside from a general low-grade panic about the current disintegration of the world).

But day before yesterday, my adorable dad—a now-retired advertising copywriter—applied, hilariously, to be my intern (“Ms. West: I could be an intern for you. I like movies. I especially like candy. I am not as detail-obsessed as my wife, but I could work at it. I have done some data entry, some audio transcription, and some research. I hope I qualify. Please let me know. -Paul West”). Looking over his resume, I remembered something kind of interesting.

Way back in the way-back-whens, working at a local ad agency, my dad came up with the folksy, long-abandoned WaMu slogan:

Washington Mutual, The Friend of the Family

Wikipedia tells me that their current slogan is (was) “Simpler Banking, More Smiles.” Ugh.

My dad always calls it Washington Mutual Savings Bank, never WaMu. I asked what he thought about the collapse. He said, “We’ve seen what happens when a nice little community savings bank grows into a greedy giant.”

This election year, I’ve been obsessed with following right-wing blog The Corner. They update all the friggin’ time—more than Slog, even—and it’s a necessary balance to The Huffington Post, which often makes me feel as though the election is in the bag for the Democrats. It’s important to know what the other side is doing, and important to remember that there’s a lot of work to do between now and November.

Plus, there are delightful moments of schadenfreude, as with this morning.

These two Corner posts, by Rich Lowry, are music to my ears:

1995 Redux?

A friend on Capitol Hill in a very dark mood thinks so. Last time, House Republicans got blamed for shutting down the government, this time they’ll get blamed for shutting down the financial system. He also worries—did I mention he’s in a dark mood?—that if nothing passes and the crash comes, the country may arrive at a turning point, moving irrevocably in the direction of a social democracy.

and

A Hostile Audience

One side effect of McCain’s debate gambit is, I’m told, that everyone at Ole Miss now hates him. It will make for a very hostile audience tonight among those students and faculty attending. He might have to apologize for creating the uncertainty or make some explanation up front, which is never ideal.

Also of note: two weeks ago, The Corner was all Palin all the time; every one of National Review’s bloggers were writing heartfelt mash notes to the VP candidate. Since her atrocious television performances, there has only been one real post about Palin in the last twenty-four hours, and that post was explaining that there was nothing wrong with not posting about Palin. Kathryn Jean Lopez explains, “Everytime there’s not a post on something — from a presidential hiccup to the Emmys — I will inevitably get an e-mail about the “deafening silence” of The Corner.”

I love watching Republicans try to justify themselves. It gives me a nice mushy feeling inside.

Defying a federal tax law they consider unjust, 33 ministers across the country will take to their pulpits this Sunday and publicly endorse a candidate for president.

They plan to then send copies of their sermons to the Internal Revenue Service, hoping to provoke a challenge to a law that bars religious organizations and other nonprofits that accept tax-deductible contributions from involvement in partisan political campaigns. …

Organizers said they wanted a range of clergy of various faiths and political persuasions to join the protest, but acknowledged that the participants might be “weighted” toward the conservative end of the spectrum and more likely to support the Republican candidate, Senator John McCain, than the Democrat, Senator Barack Obama.

Yes, nothing could be better than freeing right-wing financial entities from government regulation! That’s been been great so far! Hell, let’s allow businesses to be free from taxes, banks free of accountability, candidates free from reporting requirements, and just replace libraries of law with a thin little book with some red type. What could go wrong?

OMG! The suspense is killing me—I mean, so much hinges on this! I just wish there was some way to know in advance who won tonight’s presidential debate!

Oh.

Although the fate of tonight’s presidential debate in Mississippi remains very much up in the air, John McCain has apparently already won it—if you believe an Internet ad an astute reader spotted next to this piece in the online edition of the Wall Street Journal this morning.

“McCain Wins Debate!” declares the ad which features a headshot of a smiling McCain with an American flag background. Another ad spotted by our eagle-eyed observer featured a quote from McCain campaign manager Rick Davis declaring: “McCain won the debate—hands down.”

Via JoeMyGod.

We have a children’s book and a mystery named Vi Agra Falls and several other events tonight.

At the Library, Robert Fisk reads from Age of the Warrior. Fisk has one of those rare Hendrik Hertzberg talents—he has commented on just about every war on Earth in the last ten years with concise and incisive language. He needs maybe a thousand words less than everybody else to talk about terribly complex subjects, and he should be a pip in person.

And at Jack Straw Productions, local literary magazine The Raven Chronicles is celebrating the release of their fourteenth volume’s first issue. They will be joined by a number of authors, including Stranger Genius John Olson and something called “Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.” This would be well worth checking out, too.

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

Hillary clearly isn’t getting through to some of her supporters…

Our new morning pastime—fretting about John in the Morning’s mental health based on his KEXP playlist—continues on Line Out.

Today’s playlist includes “Panic” by the Smiths—“hang the DJ, hang the DJ”—followed by songs about depression, suicide, and sleeping to escape the horribleness of the world. And then goes on the air to talk about how he can’t sleep lately.

From Schmader’s post, from two days ago: “I do not believe it’s fair to diagnose DJs through their playlists. But if I did, John might be ready for an intervention, or at least a big hug.”

Originally posted yesterday evening.

Who’s splitting their votes: Barack Obama for president and Dino Rossi for governor?

According to the Washington Secretary of State, we had 3,418,207 registered voters at the beginning of the month. Recent polls show those voters favor Obama by an 11-point spread (54-43), but Gregoire by only a two-point lead (50-48). This suggests thousands of voters will split their ticket. Maybe these are pro-road, anti-war voters.

Are those Rossi ads that run every five minutes on local TV having an impact? Like Obama, Rossi’s selling himself as an agent of change. Is he riding a backlash against incumbents? Or is he riding a backlash against Republicans, using the “GOP” label to mislead voters about his true Republican colors? Or is Gregoire a dud?

We want to know who these folks are and how they reached their conclusions. Are you one of them? Do you know one? Send me an email or put your theories, explanations, or wild speculations in comments.

If you have not read this Very Special Presidential-Debate Installment of I Love Television™, you are not ready for tonight’s debate, much less the rest of your day/life. An excerpt:

THE HANDSHAKE

The opening handshake is incredibly important, because this is where the candidate must indicate dominance. Without pausing, race to the middle of the stage, grab your opponent’s hand, and, with your other hand, firmly grasp his elbow. Smile broadly, squeeze the shit out of his arm, and whisper in his ear, “You my bitch, right? Say you my bitch. That’s right, bitch… I’m gonna make you cry like a little bitch, bitch.” Then let go, smile and wave at your audience, and take your place behind the podium.

That’s if you’re Sarah Palin.

However, if you’re Barack Obama you should definitely go for the high five. Why? Because of his war injuries, John McCain CAN’T RAISE HIS ARMS! And when he doesn’t return the high five, Barack can be like, “Fine… leave me hanging, jerk!”

You may especially enjoy the section on the efficacy of pantsing as a debate tactic. Thank you, Wm.™ Steven Humphrey.

ALSO! Watch the debate with your live-Slogging, drink-swilling host Dan Savage right here, starting at 5:30 p.m.!

^{Also! I would like to predict right now that the vice-presidential debate will never happen, even if the GOP has to manufacture a hurricane to prevent it!}

Chris Rock on Larry King:

KING: You must be … proud that at this stage in our history a black man is running for president on a major ticket.

ROCK: Um, you know what? I’m proud Barack Obama’s running for president. You know? If it was Flavor Flav, would I be proud? No. I don’t support Barack Obama because he’s black.

You all should be deeply, deeply ashamed:

“Withdrawals by customers ultimately sank WaMu”

It’s your fault!

Wow… this is going to be awesome. Frank Chopp—Democrat, House Speaker, and the BIAW’s sniveling bitch—has his very own plan for replacing the Viaduct. He wants to build something bigger, wider, and taller—and something more expensive than all the other options currently on the table. Here’s an “artist’s rendering”:

Frank Chopp wants to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct with… a mile-long water-front shopping mall. A mall with 100,000 cars a day roaring through it. And office space. But, hey, he’s going to a park on top, so everybody wins.

Does anyone have a clue as to how much soundproofing would be required—and how much it would cost—to make working or shopping inside the Alaska Way Viaduct even barely tolerable?

Thanks to Slog tippers Tyler & Emily.

McCain will show.

In this game, McCain’s game, the possible moves and their consequences:

To a large extent, McCain has taken a riverboat gamble because (1) he is not even on the Senate banking committee and Dodd won’t give him the time of day, let alone a real role in shaping the bill, (2) the ranking member of the banking committee (Shelby) opposes the bill, and (3) the House Republicans are in open revolt against the President. If McCain tucks his tail between his legs and flies to Mississippi to debate Obama at Ole Miss, he will hardly look like a man of action who flew to Washington, banged heads together, and got a bill. On the other hand, if he stays in Washington to work on the bill (meaning fighting Dodd, Shelby, and the House Republicans) Obama will ask the moderator, Jim Lehrer, to moderate a town hall meeting with questions from the audience. That would be an unmitigated disaster for McCain. Obama would get at least an hour of free TV time and look like a President at a press conference fielding questions in a mature way and McCain would look like just another squabbling congressman. Of course, McCain knows this very well so he will try really, really hard to get a bill today so he can fly off to Mississippi in triumph. Dodd, of course, knows all this, too, and will try to extract huge concessions from McCain (which he knows Boehner will never swallow) in return for a bill today. It’s all high-stakes poker with Paulson, Bush, Dodd, Boehner, McCain and Obama all having different interests. Anything is possible at this point.

All Your Banks Are Belong To Us: WaMu seized, sold to JPMorgan

Breakdown: Republicans stall bailout plan. McCain watches from the sidelines, awaits the cold embrace of death.

The Show Must Go On: Mississippi governor says he expects Obama/McCain debate to go on as originally planned. If McCain doesn’t show, Obama say he’lll explain how to fix economy, Iraq, etc. and will try out stand-up material he’s been working on.

Extremism: Israeli settlers start blowing shit up.

AT&T Is the New R.J. Reynolds: Cell phone execs refuse to testify before congress.

“A Scheme to Conceal From the Public”: “Uncle Ted” Stevens’ trial gets underway.

Don’t Be So Defensive: Congress slashes DARPA’s budget by $130 million.

It’ll Be Rubble By Then: Viaduct plan won’t be in place until after the election.

Stupid Idea of the Day: PETA asks Ben & Jerry’s to dump cows, switch to breast milk.

Game Over: Douchebag anti-video-game activist/attorney gets disbarred.

Grampa gets owned by ELLEN!

Bonus: I’d bet tonight’s debate goes something like this.

UPDATED at 10:20p:
The New York Times has a fantastic article up on the collapse.

The Seattle Times deserves credit for getting the story right before just about anyone else.

UPDATED at 6:30p:

Washington Mutual was seized by Federal regulators. JP Morgan Chase bought up the retail bank parts of WaMu. Customers should have a “seamless transition” (for some of the reasons I speculated about below.) Washington Mutual, as a company, is no more.

This was the largest failure of a bank in US history.

Don’t panic. Your deposits—up to $100,000 per person—are insured.

It’s everywhere. I like Bloomberg better than Rupert Murdoch, so:

JPMorgan Chase & Co., the third- biggest U.S. bank by assets, agreed to acquire the deposits of Washington Mutual Inc. as the thrift was seized by regulators in the biggest bank failure in U.S. history.

JPMorgan will pay $1.9 billion, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. said in a statement today. It won’t acquire liabilities including claims by equity, subordinated and senior debt holders, the FDIC said….

WaMu was the second-biggest provider of option ARMs, behind Wachovia, with $54 billion held in its portfolio in the first quarter, according to Inside Mortgage Finance. Of the $230 billion in loans secured by real estate at the end of the second quarter, $16.9 billion were subprime mortgages. WaMu, which ranked sixth among U.S. mortgage companies last year, was the 11th-biggest subprime lender in 2006, according to Inside Mortgage Finance.

Some advice:
If you have an account at WaMu, it’s wise to go online and print out your current statement. If you don’t have online access to your account, you can go to an ATM and get a “mini-statement” printout for free. You almost certainly won’t need this documentation, but it cannot hurt to have it.

And a bit of gratitude:
I’ve always had a positive experience when banking at WaMu. The tellers have been good, the ATMs generally low-fee and the locations convenient (even when I’m visiting the East coast or the Midwest.)

So, thank you to all the employees at WaMu. My heart goes out to all of you who are about to suffer because of the irresponsible few at the top.

One of the ugliest aspects of deregulation is the most irresponsible (but profitable in the short term) could outcompete the responsible for promotions. Thanks to all of you in WaMu’s management who refused to go along with this gambit and have seen your careers suffer for it.

Continue reading "The End of WaMu: Collapse and Purchase in Parts" »

Go here, vote for Darcy!

A Slog tipper with Republican connections sends over a link to images of Cindy McCain’s fundraiser in Washington State yesterday—held well after John McCain announced he was “suspending” his campaign.

The link arrived in my in-box at about the same time as this new memo from the Obama camp. It calls McCain’s “suspension” a pure political stunt.

Make no mistake: John McCain did not “suspend” his campaign. He just turned a national crisis into an occasion to promote his campaign. It’s become just another political stunt, aimed more at shoring up the Senator’s aimed more at shoring up the Senator’s political fortunes than the nation’s economy. And it does nothing to help advance this critical legislation to protect the American people during this time of economic crisis.

The full memo, quite long and full of citations, is in the jump.

Continue reading "This Is What a Suspended Campaign Looks Like?" »

Does Sarah Palin have any gay friends?

She claimed she had gay friends back when she running for governor of Alaska in 2006. But no one has been able to find any of Sarah Palin’s gay friends. Did Sarah Palin lie about having gay friends? Looks that way. But why would this darling of the religious right lie about having gay friends? Palin probably figured that having gay friends—or claiming to have gay friends—would help her appeal to the kind of moderate voters turned off by gay-bashing religious batshits. So while Palin supports every last hateful position taken by the likes of James Dobson and Fred Phelps, she was able to point to her imaginary gay friends to prove to moderate voters that she doesn’t actually, you know, hate gay people herself. Hey, she can’t! She’s got gay friends! (It’s kind of like how John McCain has a gay chief of staff proves that he’s not anti-gay. He may take every anti-gay position imaginable, throw his lot in with the haters, and cast anti-gay votes at nearly every opportunity. But he’s not anti-gay, no sir!)

But you know what? I think Sarah Palin could probably use some gay friends about now. (Right now a gay friend would be telling Palin that Katie Couric is a total bitch.) And, hey, maybe if Sarah Palin had some real gay friends she might realize that she’s wrong about gay rights and gay marriage and gay adoption. So I made this video offering my friendship to Sarah Palin…

Do you want to be Sarah Palin’s gay friend too? Make a video explaining why you should be Sarah Palin’s gay friend, upload it to YouTube, send me the link, and I’ll post it on Slog. Sarah Palin may have been lying when she claimed to have gay friends back in 2006 but this is America, my friends, where we can make the lies come true! And Sarah “Thanks But No Thanks!” Palin has enough lies to keep track of without having to worry about that whopper she told Alaskans about having gay friends back in 2006.

So let’s help Sarah out! Let’s get her some gay friends! I’m in! Who else wants to be Sarah Palin’s gay friend?

The Moses Lake City Council took no action Wednesday on a proposed ordinance to ban pit bulls in the city.

The council decided to form a committee of dog owners and other residents to find a compromise.

The Columbia Basin Herald reports that a pit bull that mauled a 6-year-old boy Sept. 12 will be killed. Police cited the owner for keeping a vicious dog, having a dog at large and not having a pet license.

More on a local push for a pit bull ban here.

I’m a straight female. My boyfriend and I were together for almost 6 years, and then we broke up for a year. Now we’re back together and the sex is better than ever; he’s not nearly as inhibited as he used to be. He’s also apparently developed some new kinks, which is great. But one of them confuses me: he wants to lick my armpit. Is this normal? I’d feel really self-conscious. Is this just some weird hangup on my part that I need to just get over? And if I do let him lick it, am I obligated to lick his armpit in return? I’m not sure I want to go there. Do any of your readers have experience with this? Pretty Unsure

An actual, honest-to-God “Savage Love” letter—but it came in about two weeks ago, not today. But how could I resist?

God alone knows what happened to your boyfriend during the year you were apart, PU. A sudden thing for armpits? Either your boyfriend was kidnapped and sold to gay pirates who in turn sold him to a gay brothel in Amsterdam where any number of unspeakably kinky things were done to him… or… your boyfriend suddenly realized that armpits are not, as deodorant commercials would have us believe, filthy little shitdivots teaming with germs and bacteria and other stankbugs. Instead, he somehow realized that armpit are an erogenous zone where crazy-making glands secrete crazy-making sex pheromones and that once a person gets over his or her advertising-induced psychosis about his armpits, there’s pretty much nothing hotter than burying your face in the armpit of someone you love.

Seattle Police are investigating a series of burglaries at several North Seattle fire stations after hundreds of dollars were stolen from the stations over the last few months.

Earlier this summer, firefighters at four north end stations discovered that collections of cash—known as “clutch funds,” used to purchase meals and other sundries for firefighters staying at the stations—had disappeared.

Around $300 was taken from one fire station, while smaller collections of $50-100 and various food supplies were taken from others. In each case, there was no sign of a break-in.

Following the burglaries, Dean sent out several memos urging battalion chiefs to change the station door codes and deposit clutch funds into bank accounts. However, Seattle Fire Department spokeswoman Dana Vander Houwen says that even after door codes at the stations were changed, one of the previously robbed stations was hit again.

Vander Houwen says SFD is now stepping up security at fire stations.

Via Dealbook:

The federal government has arranged for Washington Mutual to sell its deposits and some branches to JPMorgan Chase, people briefed on the matter said Thursday night.

Sorry; this isn’t related to armpits at all. Mudflats sez:

Today we hear that Palin has requested, and received, a four day extension for the disclosure of her personal finances. The new release date for these forms? October 3rd, the day AFTER her scheduled debate with Joe Biden.

I wonder what she’s hiding? How many more squirm-inducing moments can Sarah Palin offer up in the 39 days left before the election? And, as Ari Melber pointed out this morning, Palin’s running mate needs to do some disclosing of his own:

So it’s rather surprising that as the general election hits the homestretch, the McCain campaign has effectively squashed efforts by journalists, medical experts and the political class to fully examine his medical records.

The most recent review of McCain’s records cannot be described as independent or thorough. In May, the campaign gave a limited group of reporters only three hours to review thousands of documents. Aside from the time limit, the selected reporters were “ensconced” in a cone of silence, as CNN reported. The campaign banned the use of cell phones or e-mail for journalists, who might have consulted with experts while assessing the medical information. It’s not clear why so many news outlets consented to such terms.

As Palin keeps bombing, the issue of McCain’s age and health become more and more important.

The newly-returned-from-London Hari Kondabolu recently introduced me to weird, sad, politically astute British comic Stewart Lee, and I am rapidly falling in comedy love.

If you have some time, watch these two clips, in which Lee gently and elegantly dismantles a subject very near and dear to my heart: Stupid fucks (and people’s grandmas) who bitch and moan about political correctness. It involves the following: “They’re saying I can’t have an electric fire in the bath anymore, Stew, in case queers see it!”

If you really have a lot of time (and a Region 2 DVD player), I heartily recommend watching the whole thing.

The Los Angeles Times this week inaugurated its blog Culture Monster, and in today’s entry by architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne, he contends not only with Brad Cloepfil’s renovated “lollypop” building in Columbus Circle—but also with Ada Louise Huxtable’s 1964 monument of criticism, written on the occasion of the original Columbus Circle building by Edward Durell Stone.

Huxtable has yet to weigh in on the new building in the Wall Street Journal…

I implore you. Let the madness end here:

And that, ECB, is the real reason McCain is doing this debate shuffling and campaign suspending.

He’ll do what it takes to keep her from speaking extemporaneously anywhere near a microphone.

Like Sullivan says—Palin is like Ricky Gervais sketch. You squirm, you wince, and you keep watching.

Sorry Dan, I’m with Charles on this one…

^{Photo © Kelly O, 2006 AVN Porn Convention, Las Vegas Nevada}

Banking on the sexiness of wearing the news, CNN is proudly promoting t-shirts emblazoned with headlines. Most of today’s headlines from CNN, of course, would make for dreadfully dull t-shirts. For instance, who wants to go popping around wearing “Senator calls economic meeting a distraction”? Not me. So they’ve picked the hilarious headlines like “Colors shifting on CNN electoral map.” Woo hoo. Instead, you should be allowed to pick out any headline you like for a customized t-shirt. Such as:

What t-shirt would you make?

Nothing wrong with her:

Can’t we all just get along, Charles?

I was about to say no, there’s no Alaskan whose artistic contribution to the world could offset the freak show that is Sarah Palin (the woman makes Katie Couric look like Sam Spade!).

Who’re the candidates?

The guy who did this? (Eustace Ziegler)

This self-proclaimed “most popular” artist of Alaska? (Rie Muñoz)

No, they do not do it. But then I remembered walking up Jackson Street the other night and doing a double-take at a slab of something pink and glowing in a storefront window. It was Stonington Gallery, specializing in native art and especially the glorious Haida and Tlingit traditions. The traditions aren’t exactly associated in my mind with the statehood of Alaska, so I was going to disqualify them on that count. But I suppose Alaska-the-land (if not Alaska-the-state) at least deserves credit for helping to inspire and sustain those artists.

And anyway, contemporary Eskimo carvers can be pretty freaking amazing. Check out this narwhal on a killer-whale tooth base by Paul Rookook:

The guy who made that seems like a badass. Like maybe he even has some foreign-policy experience. Paul Rookook for VP?

In the wake of John McCain saying that “the fundamentals of our economy are still strong” and all the world pointing out that Herbert Hoover said nearly the same thing on Black Thursday in 1929, Bar Exam went to Seattle’s own Hooverville-the-bar this week. Found all around Hooverville-the-bar (which has $10 pitchers of Rainier and free peanuts): evidence of Seattle’s burgeoning homeless problem (which is looking to have increased a lot more than 15 percent over the last few months). The shabby camper-encampment under the West Seattle Bridge seemed especially sad until I came across the shelter for men 50 and older.

Now we’ve got our own official non-bar Hooverville: Nickelsville. Here’s a little more in the P-I. The homeless living in the pink tents in South Seattle are being evicted by the city at 5 p.m. today. More from Nickelsville after the jump.

Continue reading "Seattle's Own Hooverville" »

An Idaho “artist” turns an Ohio cornfield into an image of Sarah Palin:

The maze in maize.

It’s not all great, but parts are, and I kind of love her.

(Thanks for the link, Towleroad.)

Sarah Palin has NO FUCKING CLUE what she’s talking about. I’ve heard homeless schizophrenics whose barely verbal raving made more sense AS ANSWERS TO KATIE COURIC’S QUESTIONS than this.

On Alaska’s proximity to Russia as foreign-policy experience:

Couric: You’ve cited Alaska’s proximity to Russia as part of your foreign policy experience. What did you mean by that?

Palin: That Alaska has a very narrow maritime border between a foreign country, Russia, and on our other side, the land— boundary that we have with— Canada. It— it’s funny that a comment like that was— kind of made to— cari— I don’t know, you know? Reporters—

Couric: Mock?

PALIN: Yeah, mocked, I guess that’s the word, yeah.

COURIC: Explain to me why that enhances your foreign policy credentials.

PALIN: Well, it certainly does because our— our next door neighbors are foreign countries. They’re in the state that I am the executive of. And there in Russia—

COURIC: Have you ever been involved with any negotiations, for example, with the Russians?

PALIN: We have trade missions back and forth. We— we do— it’s very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia as Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where— where do they go? It’s Alaska. It’s just right over the border. It is— from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there. They are right next to— to our state.

On the $700 billion bailout:

Couric: If this doesn’t pass, do you think there’s a risk of another Great Depression?

Palin: Unfortunately, that is the road that America may find itself on. Not necessarily this, as it’s been proposed, has to pass or we’re going to find ourselves in another Great Depression. But, there has got to be action - bipartisan effort - Congress not pointing fingers at one another but finding the solution to this, taking action, and being serious about the reforms on Wall Street that are needed.

Couric: Would you support a moratorium on foreclosures to help average Americans keep their homes?

Palin: That’s something that John McCain and I have both been discussing - whether that … is part of the solution or not. You know, it’s going to be a multi-faceted solution that has to be found here.

On middle-class Americans and the economy:

Couric: Why isn’t it better, Governor Palin, to spend $700 billion helping middle-class families who are struggling with health care, housing, gas and groceries? Allow them to spend more, and put more money into the economy, instead of helping these big financial institutions that played a role in creating this mess?

Palin: That’s why I say I, like every American I’m speaking with, were ill about this position that we have been put in. Where it is the taxpayers looking to bail out. But ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy. Um, helping, oh, it’s got to be about job creation, too. Shoring up our economy, and getting it back on the right track. So health care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions, and tax relief for Americans, and trade — we have got to see trade as opportunity, not as, uh, competitive, um, scary thing, but one in five jobs created in the trade sector today. We’ve got to look at that as more opportunity. All of those things under the umbrella of job creation.

On specific ways McCain has pushed for oversight of the banking industry:

Palin: I think that the example that you just cited, with his warnings two years ago about Fannie and Freddie - that, that’s paramount. That’s more than a heck of a lot of other senators and representatives did for us.

Couric: But he’s been in Congress for 26 years. He’s been chairman of the powerful Commerce Committee. And he has almost always sided with less regulation, not more.

Palin: He’s also known as the maverick though, taking shots from his own party, and certainly taking shots from the other party. Trying to get people to understand what he’s been talking about - the need to reform government.

Couric: But can you give me any other concrete examples? Because I know you’ve said Barack Obama is a lot of talk and no action. Can you give me any other examples in his 26 years of John McCain truly taking a stand on this?

Palin: I can give you examples of things that John McCain has done, that has shown his foresight, his pragmatism, and his leadership abilities. And that is what America needs today.

Couric: I’m just going to ask you one more time - not to belabor the point. Specific examples in his 26 years of pushing for more regulation.

Palin: I’ll try to find you some and I’ll bring them to you.

Bonus #1: Watch tonight for Part 2 of the interview, in which Palin warns against planning for withdrawal in Iraq—apparently unaware that the Bush administration has already agreed on a date for withdrawal—and calls for a surge in Afghanistan:

Katie Couric: Why is it much more challenging there? Can you explain that?

Sarah Palin: The logistics that we are already suggesting here, not having enough troops in the area right now. The… things like the terrain even in Afghanistan and that border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, where, you know, we believe that— Bin Laden is— is hiding out right now and… and is still such a leader of this terrorist movement. There… there are many more challenges there. So, again, I believe that… a surge in Afghanistan also will lead us to victory there as it has proven to have done in Iraq. And as I say, Katie, that we cannot afford to retreat, to withdraw in Iraq. That’s not gonna get us any better off in Afghanistan either. And as our leaders are telling us in our military, we do need to ramp it up in Afghanistan, counting on our friends and allies to assist with us there because these terrorists who hate America, they hate what we stand for with the… the freedoms, the democracy, the… the women’s rights, the tolerance, they hate what it is that we represent and our allies, too, and our friends, what they represent. If we were… were to allow a stronghold to be captured by these terrorists then the world is in even greater peril than it is today. We cannot afford to lose in Afghanistan.

Bonus #2: In an off-the-cuff response to a reporter’s question about Islamic extremists, Palin linked Iraq to 9/11:

Reporter: Do you think that our presence in Iraq and Afghanistan—our continued military presence there—is inflaming Islamic extremists?

Palin: I think our presence in Iraq and in Afghanistan will lead to further security of our nation. Again, because the mission is to take the fight over there, do not let them come over here and attempt again what they accomplished here. And that was some destruction. Terrible destruction on that day. But, since September 11th, Americans uniting and rebuilding and committing to never letting that happen again.

The video is too cringe-inducing for me to link, but it’s available basically everywhere on the Internet.

The Vulture quotes Nicholas Sparks at the premiere of the film version of his book Nights in Rodanthe. Sayeth the author of The Notebook:

“I write a dramatic epic love story, I write modern-day Greek tragedies, and there’s a big difference between that and romance. You have romance novels, and then you have what I do, more along the lines of love stories like Eric Segal’s Love Story or The Bridges of Madison County, and those are both male writers. But you can even go all the way back. You had Hemingway write A Farewell to Arms, the movies of the forties — Casablanca, From Here to Eternity — Shakespeare, and that’s the genre I work in,”

Sounds like a certain somebody thinks the size of his paycheck is commensurate with the size of his writing talent. It also sounds a bit like he thinks the two major reasons he’s not a romance writer is (a) because his characters die and also (b) he has a penis.

A group of Ballard activists are working with neighborhood churches to provide shower and car-camping facilities for the homeless.

Sustainable Ballard volunteer Mary-Lee Mahar says her group —along with the Ballard Homes For All Coalition—has almost finished building their first portable shower—a 8x10 trailer on wheels—and is now looking for churches to open up their parking lots to car campers.

In the last few years, there’s been an increase in the number of homeless people living out of cars and camper vans in Ballard. Some campers had been parking in pay lots around the neighborhood, but nearby businesses complained about problems on the properties and most of the campers were forced out.

Mahar has been talking to churches in Ballard about allowing a few cars to park on their properties. “There’s 52 churches in Ballard. If each church took three or four campers, that’s a lot of campers [off the streets],” she says.

According to Mahar, Sustainable Ballard would like to build about 20 shower trailers, which cost about $2,000 each. “[Each one has] a little water heater. They’ll get once nice 5-10 minute shower,” Mahar says.

Mahar says each shower could be used by about 50 people a day.

Mahar says her group will be meeting with council members and neighborhood groups in the next few weeks to try to build support and find funding for the project.

The prototype shower trailer will be on display at the Sustainable Ballard festival this weekend.

Shots fired in US-Pakistan clash:

The United States military says US and Afghan forces have exchanged gunfire with Pakistani troops across the border with Afghanistan.

A senior US military official says a five-minute skirmish broke out after Pakistani soldiers fired warning shots near two US helicopters.

Financial crisis (the bailout), political crisis (suspended campaigns), more political crisis (McCain polling better than he should), nuclear crisis (North Korea giving us the finger), and now the Pakistani army has the cojones to fire at the U.S. military? Could you even imagine that happening eight years ago? No. You cannot.

To repeat a post from yesterday: we are losing leverage by the day.

Via the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and the Washington Post:

House and Senate negotiators emerged from a closed-door meeting today and said they have reached agreement on basic principles governing a massive financial rescue plan that they hope to pass soon but that is running into stiff resistance from some House Republicans…. Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, told reporters after the three-hour meeting, “We’ve reached fundamental agreement on a set of principles” to guide the financial rescue plan, and he said Congress could pass a bill within days. He said the principles include protection for taxpayers, effective oversight, help for homeowners facing foreclosure and limits on the compensation of executives whose firms take bailout money….

The agreement also includes a strong oversight board for the bailout program, a ban on golden parachutes and other excessive compensation for executives at participating firms and protections for taxpayers, including a provision that would require participating companies to give taxpayers equity in their firms. In addition, the package would provide relief for community banks that own now worthless stock in mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which were taken over by the government.

The main point of contention between Democrats and Republicans, Frank said, is a proposal to give bankruptcy judges new power to modify mortgages for homeowners, an idea that is widely viewed as a bargaining chip. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama (D-Ill.) has said the measure, which is fiercely opposed by the banking industry, should not be in the bill.

Why Obama would be siding with congressional Republicans, against helping mortgage holders in bankruptcy court attempting to pull themselves above water, is beyond me.

You know my thoughts on what’s missing from this bailout. This plan is costly, and does little to address the fundamental underlying problems that got us to this place.

When I say fundamental underlying problems, I’m not talking about the desperate need to reregulate the financial markets—starting with the provisions of the Glass-Steagall act and nationalizing debt rating agencies.

We need to generate new technologies and industries worth investing in, or we’ll be right back to this dark place.

This bailout might delay things for a few months, or a few years. But, the problem remains and will remain even if this plan is enacted.

I am the last person in the world to begrudge people their election anxiety, but looking at some of the electoral college vote prediction sites that I frequent, I don’t see as much cause for Obama-related alarm. At least not today.

Here’s the current Real Clear Politics map. It’s close, but Obama wins:

FiveThirtyEight and ElectoralVote agree: If the election were held today, Obama would be the victor (and, according to their models, by an even larger margin than RCP is showing).

The key phrase, of course, being: If the election were held today. Which it will not be.

KUOW’s Phyllis Fletcher.

Dan, you know I don’t play:

^{Hugo Ludeña’s Gilberto Y Efrein (2003), chromogenic print, 16 by 24 inches}

At Greg Kucera Gallery. (Gallery site here. The show closes Saturday!)

There’s nothing much special about this photograph, which is exactly why I like it. It portends a world in which gay marriage is so normal as to be barely noticeable.

I see your hairy pit, Charles, and raise with this bizarrely ripped pit.

More of this guy here.

Haaretz has an interesting story about how a brand new translation of Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 has climbed to the top of the Hebrew bestseller lists. The book has sold 15,000 copies in 2 weeks.

As an aside, a great Heller book that will probably never climb the Hebrew bestseller lists is God Knows, which is a first-person comic novel about the life of King David. There’s sex and puns and lively, pungent commentary about power and politics and sex. If you haven’t read a lot of Heller and you don’t quite get his allure, I suggest that one—you can probably find it at just about any used book store for a buck and a half.

Today’s P-I has a piece by Larry Lange about the “debate” over how much Sound Transit’s light rail expansion proposal really costs. The “debate” in question: Whether the plan costs $17.8 billion, as Sound Transit says, or $107 billion, as longtime light-rail opponents Jim MacIsaac and John Niles (really, really longtime opponents) say.

This debate is only a “debate” if you assume the following premises: 1) Sound Transit is lying and plans to violate a resolution its board passed to stop collecting the additional half-percent of sales tax in 2038; and 2) Seattle households are actually a whole lot richer (and spend a whole lot more money) than the US Census and city and state demographers say they are.

On the first point: Lange writes, “Transportation planner and Sound Transit critic Jim MacIsaac estimates approval of the measure would authorize collection of more than $107.3 billion over 45 years…”

There are two reasons why this “estimate” is wrong. First, it includes taxes from Sound Transit’s Phase 1—taxes the voters passed more than ten years ago, taxes that have nothing to do with the proposal on the ballot this November. Second, as mentioned above, it assumes Sound Transit will continue collecting the taxes well into the 2050s and beyond. That would require Sound Transit to build a third phase of light rail—Sound Transit 3—without getting authority from the voters, and to defy a board resolution mandating that the agency will discontinue the tax once the new lines are paid off around 2038.

On the second point: If the “typical household,” whatever that means, actually spent $284 on a half-percent sales tax increase, that would mean that a typical household in the Sound Transit taxing area spends nearly $57,000 a year on goods subject to sales tax—which excludes food, utilities, and rent. Considering that the median household income in the Sound Transit taxing area is only around $64,000, that’s a pretty hefty chunk to be blowing on clothes, iPods, and lattes.

A side note on that point: Sound Transit didn’t, as Lange reports, “assume a total of 1.3 million households throughout the three counties” and “divide the tax bill by more housholds” to get a lower result. They used those 1.3 million to arrive at a median—the middle point between the highest and the lowest-income households in the group. A median, unlike a mean, doesn’t require “dividing by” anything—and it doesn’t depend on how many households there are. For purposes of defining a “typical” household, it’s also more accurate than just dividing total income by the total number of households in an area—the method MacIsaac acknowledged he used to figure out how much a “typical” household would be spending. (The Mass Transit Now campaign has requested a correction).

Finally, as I noted here (and as Lange, oddly, did not report, despite reporting on the initial court challenge) a lawsuit seeking to change the Sound Transit ballot title to include the $107 billion figure was dismissed with prejudice by King County Superior Court judge John Erlick, who said, “There is neither a factual nor a legal basis for [Knedlik’s] proposed redrafting of the ballot title” or explanatory statement in the voters’ guide.

Knedlik, like Niles and MacIsaac, has a long history as a light-rail antagonist. In addition to being a perennial candidate and former attorney (he was disbarred for filing too many frivolous lawsuits), Knedlik sued Sound Transit (and lost) once before—in 2004, when he demanded a refund on taxpayers’ money and a rollback of Sound Transit taxes.

Greg Lundgren, the guy who invented Vital 5 Productions, who makes gravestones out of glass, and who owns the art bar with an art vending machine and the best Greyhounds in town, the Hideout, does not like politics. But the situation is so dire he’s making an exception.

From now until October 30, 40 percent of all the proceeds of any work of art you buy at the Hideout will go to the Obama/Biden campaign. The Hideout walls are covered in modestly priced great stuff by local artists. Or 100 percent of proceeds from sales of The Vital 5 Cookbook (which is serious fun and only 25 bucks) will go to the campaign.

Here’s the glorious art vending machine at the Hideout (from here). (I think the Obama deal applies to the art on the walls, but it could include the machine, too—or you could probably talk Greg into it if you’re passionate enough.)

And in another election universe, from Greg’s mass email this morning:

And while I am writing about elections…

Vital 5 Productions was asked to nominate a Northwest poet for this years Poet Populist Award. It took us about .01 seconds to raise our hand and point to Arne Pihl. For those of you who know Arne, it is an easy choice to make. He is an amazing poet and writer, publishing books like Deck Hand Arm, Girls, Girls, Girls, and Montana, with a very hefty stack of loose leaf paper waiting to be published. If you don’t know much about Arne’s work, he writes about commercial fishing, professional drinking, a whole lot of women trouble, and some deep thoughts about why men are so screwed up. He is the working man’s poet and he deserves a big round of applause. We ask that you check out his work (there is one poem posted on the website and all three of his books are at the Hideout) and VOTE FOR ARNE online at: www.poetpopulist.org.

Well, okay, but Paul Constant disagrees. He wanted Geologic.

For news on the official investigation of Stranger columnists Ann & Nancy Willson of Heart, head to Line Out.

These folks were on Fourth Avenue and Pine Street yesterday at rush hour.

It’s good to see some Gregoire signs around town. But between the signs that scream “LIES” and “You Go Girl,” this ends up looking mostly like an eviction notice.

No less than 61 Nobel Laureates in Science have Endorsed Obama:

A group of 61 Nobel Laureates have gotten together to endorse Barack Obama for President… This is the largest number of Nobel Laureates to ever endorse a candidate for office, more than endorsed either Gore or Kerry. (Kerry had 48 total.) That is a remarkable statement.

Penguin had a contest to design the cover of a new novel, Sam Taylor’s The Island at the End of the World. Here’s the synopsis:

A chilling novel about the near future, where most of the world has been destroyed by catastrophic floods. As a father and his three children begin to rebuild their lives alone on an island, his youngest son Finn begins to question how they arrived there and why they alone have been spared. Finn’s search for understanding takes an unexpected turn when a strange man named Will swims ashore, and he appears to know quite a bit about this family and the circumstances that surrounded the floods. But Finn’s father is determined to keep him silent and is willing to do anything to prevent Will from disturbing his family’s idyllic life on the island. Sam Taylor’s The Island at the End of the World is a riveting post-apocalyptic tale that explores the darkness that lies within the hearts of men.

300 people entered the contest and the 25 finalists are here for your perusal. It’s kind of a time-suck, and an interesting look at what book covers can say about a book.

Lunchtime Quickie^TM, now with totally SFW (safe for work) porn…

Twyla Tharp is the world’s most famous living choreographer. She is also famously cranky. In person, she is almost the caricature of prickly genius.

She likes talking about her self-help book, but dislikes talking about her autobiography. She parries any question about her most recent Broadway production—a critically lambasted evening of dance set to Bob Dylan songs—with flat refusal: “This is not a subject for this conversation.”

She is curt and evasive when talking about any dance other than her own, but witheringly loquacious about why it’s a good thing that theater and dance critics are being fired wholesale from American newspapers:

“Very few journalists, critics, or writers in any arena of the arts have the depth of information to give any fodder for thought.”

For any thought?

“For healthy thought.”

Listen to the rest of the tense interview—her being sharp and ornery, me being occasionally flustered—here:

(Highlights: Minute 2:10, Tharp cracks wise. Minute 7:40, Tharp politely explains that young dancers ain’t what they used to be. Minute 15:14, we discuss the reemergence of burlesque. Minute 21:56, we argue about criticism and philosophy—and she gives her thumbs-up to the death of my profession.)

But the 67-year-old dancer and choreographer, who has come to Seattle this month to make two world-premiere ballets for PNB, has earned the right to be ornery. She is not only the most famous living choreographer—she may be the most influential.

Tharp structurally rearranged the dance world in the early 1970s with her ménage à trois of classicism (ballet), avant-garde (minimalism), and pop (rock ‘n’ roll and jazz).

Read more about her in this week’s theater section.

Katie Couric asks Sarah Palin how being able to see Russia from Alaska translates into “foreign policy experience.” Holy crap.

Watch CBS Videos Online

Via Kos.

Now it’s McCain who’s in a bad spot:

Barack Obama is committed to hosting a public, televised event Friday night in Mississippi even if John McCain does not show up, an official close to the Obama campaign tells the Huffington Post.

In McCain’s absence, the Senator is willing to make the scheduled debate a townhall meeting, a one-on-one interview with NewsHour’s Jim Lehrer, or the combination of the two, the official said.

Such a course of action could make life incredibly difficult for McCain, who has called for the suspension of the debate in light of the current economic crisis. Should he stay in Washington D.C. — if a bailout is not completed by then — and let Obama alone reach tens of millions of television viewers?

My prediction: There will be an economic bailout deal—or enough of a deal—today. There will be a debate tomorrow. All the rest will be spin and positioning. But, Obama will come out of this looking even-keeled and competent at multi-tasking, while McCain will have raised (with his own actions) a lot of questions about his impulsivity and ability to handle more than one problem at once.

More on this later, but for now: The win in this crazy pre-debate debate about the debate clearly goes to Obama.

Chicago Tribune:

[Findings] by a nonpartisan adoption group being released Thursday conclude that gays and lesbians are an important resource for children awaiting adoption. There is near “universal professional consensus” that these applicants should be judged on their qualifications, not sexual orientation.

“The pool of potential adoptive parents must be expanded to keep pace with the growing number of kids in foster care who are legally free for adoption,” stated the report by the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, which is based in New York.

Currently, about 129,000 U.S. children are in foster care, many of whom are older, have special needs and face grim prospects for finding a loving, permanent home.

Children like the ones being abandoned at hospitals in Nebraska. That state recently passed a “safe haven law” that allows parents to abandon children they can’t care for at hospitals without fear of prosecution. Safe haven laws were designed to save the lives of infants and newborns; instead of stuffing your newborn in a trash at prom, you can drop it off at a hospital, no questions asked. But Nebraska’s law, unlike similar laws in other states, has no age limit. Nebraska’s safe-haven law went into effect in July and so far 11 children between the ages of 1 and 17 have been left at hospitals.

Back to the Chicago Tribune story…

Besides the emotional hardships, a national ban on gay adoptions could add $87 million to $130 million to foster care system expenditures each year, the report said, citing previous research. Not only would children who are removed from gay and lesbian homes be placed in group or institutional care, which is more costly, the state would incur the costs of recruiting and training new foster parents, researchers found.

Utah currently only allows married heterosexuals to adopt. And people who hate children succeeded in putting a ban on adoptions by single gay people or same-sex couples on the ballot in Arkansas. It’s expected to pass by a wide margin. The state of Florida, which has fought hard to retain its ban on adoptions by same-sex couples, saw its first adoption by a gay couple last week, when a judge ruled that the state’s ban on adoptions by gay couples was unconstitutional. From the Miami Herald (via Towleroad)…

“The two men have fostered more than 30 children since DCF accepted their application nine years ago, from a 2-day-old newborn to a 17-year-old. Still, there was something missing. The little boy who had come to their home in 2001 wanted a real father, Smith said. Not a foster dad…. At the doctor’s office, at the grocery store, at an airline ticket counter, the boy seemed to visibly deflate every time a stranger asked Smith, ‘Is that your son?’ Smith said…. The 12-year-old boy’s teacher testified the couple were among the most involved and nurturing parents in her class. ‘I must confess,’ she told a judge, ‘the first year I had him, knowing he was of gay parents, I looked for things, and I found nothing.’”

Here’s a video interview with the Smith and his partner. It’s heartbreaking. And note that the state of Florida placed thirty three foster children in Smith’s home—thirty three children—and then the state of Florida went to court and argued that these men were unfit to adopt the children the state placed in their home.

Mormon bishop pricks, to be precise:

A Hastings, Neb., Mormon man has been threatened with excommunication by his bishop for working against an anti-gay amendment in Calif.

And in Utah…

A former LDS bishop accused of molesting three girls—whom he frequently visited at home while their parents were away—pleaded guilty Wednesday to two counts of second-degree felony sexual abuse of a child in 2nd District Court. Timothy O’Sean McCleve, of Harrisville, 53, could go to prison for up to 15 years on each count when he is sentenced Nov. 26 by Judge Ernie Jones….

The girls were 6, 8 and 12 at the time of the abuse, which started in July 2006, Harrisville Police Chief Max Jackson previously told The Salt Lake Tribune. McCleve would stop by the girls’ home when their parents were away. The children trusted him because he was their bishop, he said.

I smell a sequel!

About the director of this short film, MANOJ….

….I have written:

Seattle is in the process of developing a cinematic language of its own. And it is the brave ambition of this new language to be distinct from the one that has been developed by outsiders, by those who look at our city in the way a person looks at a goldfish in a bowl. This kind of look, that of the outsider, can be seen in the new movie Battle in Seattle. Stuart Townsend, the film’s director, pictures Seattle in broad, blockish, and general (or generally laughable) terms. We laugh at the depiction of Gary Locke (Seattle as a part/port of the Far East), of a political banner dropped from a construction crane (Seattle as a hub of radical activism), and of the Space Needle (the first and final meaning of Seattle). Countering this general view of our city is a growing local cluster of views, scenes, and scenarios. The primary locus of this counterdepiction has been independent films (the cinema of Lynn Shelton, for example). But there is another locus that deserves our attention, and that is the recent body of hiphop videos produced by Zia Mohajerjasbi.

Comedy

SketchFest

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

Galleycat informs us that Minx, DC Comics’ imprint intended for young female readers, will be shuttered in January. The line put out 12 titles in two years.

Perhaps part of the failure of Minx is that it was intended for girls and all of the protagonists were girls, but only one-third of the books had female writers or artists involved. The others, like Ross Campbell’s Water Baby, pictured above, featured breasty, sexy protagonists who didn’t act like real girls. here is a typical complaint about the book:

Campbell’s art style has one or two drawbacks, though—the main one being the amped-up sexiness of the characters. Brody seems particularly busty for a thin girl (and the fat she sometimes complains about is not visible on her at all), and she and Louisa usually wear overly skimpy clothing. Sure, it’s supposed to be summer, and girls do often dress provocatively in real life, but the art often seems to linger on their nubile bodies, which probably sends the wrong sort of message to the intended audience of young teenage girls.

Also, shouldn’t Brody, who brags about her slovenly lifestyle and reticence toward bathing, have some hair on her legs or armpits? In fact, her severed leg ends in a smooth, rounded stump; don’t amputees usually have some ugly scarring?

The only three Minx comics worth reading were by the two books by Andi Watson, who is a fairly prolific comics creator in her his (in my defense, dude writes almost exclusively about women) own right, and Good as Lily, by Derek Kirk Kim and Jesse Hamm, which is a story of a teenager who is visited by past and future versions of herself. The rest of it was unexceptional when it wasn’t creepy, and the line won’t really be missed

A pony-size pig who held an Australian woman hostage for 10 days inside her home will be removed on Wednesday to a piggery, where his bacon will be saved by a stint on stud duties, rangers said.

The 176 pound pig, nicknamed Bruce, kept self-confessed animal lover Caroline Hayes, 63, in her farmhouse near Uki, in northern New South Wales State, with aggressive demands to be fed, even headbutting her bedroom door at night.

“I picked up a broom and poked him out with it and he snapped it in half with his mouth,” Hayes told Australian media.

In related Facebook news, I just became the 32,729th fan of bacon.

Tip from NaFun.

I read this morning that this ad was coming (helped along by DNC Chairman Howard Dean’s brother, who runs Democracy for America, one of the groups behind the spot). Here it is, via Ben Smith:

It’s the kind of thing that Democrats always say Republicans would do if the shoe were on the other foot—and then don’t do themselves. But now it’s being done.

As for the substance, the ad, it seems to me, makes a pretty legitimate point. (In it’s own partisan, scary-picture-showing way of course.) As Andrew Sullivan says: Release all the candidate’s medical records. There are basic things Americans deserve to know about the health of all of these characters.

Sounds like St. Paul might launch an investigation of how police behaved during the Republican National Convention.

Last night, the mayor and city council of St. Paul held an open hearing with around 200 people. Sounds like some of them were a little irritating—catcalls, chanting—but the important testimonies (especially from Elliot Hughes, the kid who was knocked out, then woke up in a pool of his own blood, then blindfolded and tortured during his night in jail) happened.

From the AP:

Bruce Nestor, president of the Minnesota Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, called for an independent investigation with a budget, the power to compel testimony and to subpoena records. He also called for discipline of officers who acted wrongly, and — like many others — asked that the charges against all protesters be dropped.

Leah Lane, a 19-year-old from Eau Claire, Wis., showed video of herself being repeatedly pepper sprayed and knocked down by police, as she was holding her fingers in the peace sign and saying “I love you.” She said she feels police were doing their job, but that too much force was used.

Another 19-year-old, Elliot Hughes of St. Paul, was visibly distraught as he claimed he was tortured in the Ramsey County Jail.

Hughes said he was punched and fell to the ground, and that his head was slammed on the jail floor. He said he was taken out of his cell to another area, where his ankles were bent backward and a bag was placed over his head. He also claimed he was denied food and water.

“I was screaming, crying, begging God for mercy,” Hughes said. “One officer was even disgusting enough to say, ‘Your God is not with you right now. We are all devils.’”

Speaking of armpits:

The New York Times illustrated an arts short about the proposed musical adaptation of American Psycho with this picture of Christian Bale from the 2000 film version of Bret Easton Ellis’ 1991 novel.

There are worse ways to start the day than with a perfectly gratuitous shot of Christian Bale’s unbelievably sexy armpits, abs, shoulders, tits, etc. This photo only appeared in the print edition of the NYT, though, so web-only readers missed out. Keep the eye candy coming, NYT photo editors, and I’ll never let my subscription lapse.

Because currently, a ride on an “express” bus from the Rainier Valley—a route that roughly parallels the coming light rail line—means spending 50 minutes on a sweltering, overcrowded bus that runs just once an hour (got a bike? tough shit—if two people got there before you, you’re waiting another hour.) Here’s what it looks like from the inside (sorry for the crappy cell-phone photo):

Light rail, in contrast, will run every six minutes and allow bikes on board. And it’ll get to Capitol Hill in a fraction of the time it takes for the slow, crappy, stuck-in-traffic bus to chug the six miles from Rainier Beach through rush-hour traffic. This may not be obvious to people who drive to work, but having options—that is, options other than sitting in rush-hour traffic on the slow, crappy bus or even in a car—is worth paying a little more in taxes.

Watch the Presidential debate with SLOG this Friday!

Two open mics, two readings by authors who always read in Seattle—Garth Stein, Jennie Shortridge, and David Guterson—and a whole bunch more tonight.

Up at Third Place Books, Jeffrey Overstreet reads from Cyndere’s Midnight, which is another book in the Aurelia’s Thread young adult fantasy series. You’ll have to Google if you want any more information on this one—young adult fantasy series all sound alike to me.

At the University Book Store, David Arnold explores the relations between salmon and people—not like that, you pervert—in The Fishermen’s Frontier: People and Salmon in Southeast Alaska. Since this is Seattle, and since the book has Alaska in the title, I bet at least one Palin-related question will be asked.

At Elliott Bay Book Company, Rinku Sen and Fekkak Mamdouh talk about how shitty it is to be an immigrant in post-9/11 America. They are here in support of their new book, The Accidental American.

And over at Town Hall, Robert J. Shiller reads from The Subprime Solution: How Today’s Global Financial Crisis Happened, and What to Do About It. A month ago, this probably seemed like a nice little mid-level-attendance reading. As of last week, this became the reading to attend. Expect a madhouse of panicked Americans. In other words, it should be fun.

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

Maryland:

The Rev. Aaron Joseph Cote, who once served as a pastor at Mother Seton Parish in Germantown, has been indicted on one count of child abuse in a case that alleges he sexually touched a teenage altar boy, according to court records…. [The former altar boy] accused Cote of sexually abusing him from 2001 to 2002, when he was 14 and 15 years old, at locations in Germantown and Washington, D.C. Cote is only charged with abuse that occurred in Germantown, according to the charging documents.

Cote was assigned as an associate pastor and youth minister at Mother Seton from 1999 to 2002.

After Rains’ allegations were made in 2003, the Order of Dominican Fathers and Brothers sent Cote for psychological evaluation, conducted an investigation and cleared him of any wrongdoing, church officials have said. Cote then was assigned a position as youth minister and associate pastor at a Providence, R.I., church.

Pennsylvania:

A Duquesne youth minister pleaded guilty to six counts including involuntary manslaughter in the death… last Nov. 20 of Chelsea McAllister of Duquesne….

Chelsea was part of a mime troupe that had performed earlier on the night of her death at Grace Community Ministries in Pittsburgh’s Hill District… Police said Owens allowed two boys in the group to see his 16-gauge sawed-off shotgun. Deputy District Attorney Laura Ditka said Owens left the gun behind as he exited the house.

According to a police affidavit, a 14-year-old boy picked up the gun and it went off as Chelsea was entering the house. She was struck in the face.

UPDATE: “Does this mean our financial crisis is over?” asks Justin in comments. “Yeah, I thought you were suspending YPW. What gives?” says Julie. “Country First, Dan.”

Youth Pastor Watch remains suspended, as I wrote yesterday, while I work on solving our financial crisis. But YPW is suspended like the McCain campaign is suspended—you know, the McCain campaign, which is still running attack ads in swing states and sending surrogates to cable TV news programs to attack Barack Obama. The McCain campaign is suspended because McCain says it is, not because it actually is. In the same spirit, YPW is suspended because I say that it is, not because I’ve actually stopped posting YPW items to Slog.

See how that works?

You might want to set your dial to KUOW. Because any second now Dan Rather is going to haul off and punch Steve Scherr in the face. A true “driveway moment.”

Here’s Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, mocking John McCain’s belief that tomorrow’s 9 p.m. presidential debate will somehow interfere with getting a Wall Street bailout passed:

What, does McCain think the Senate will still be working at 9 p.m. Friday?

Just about every other big Democrat is heaping similar scorn on McCain’s move. Except Bill Clinton, who defended McCain today on Good Morning America:

“We know he didn’t do it because he’s afraid because Sen. McCain wanted more debates,” Clinton said, adding that he was “encouraged” by the joint statement from McCain and Sen. Barack Obama.

“You can put it off a few days the problem is it’s hard to reschedule those things,” Clinton said, “I presume he did that in good faith since I know he wanted — I remember he asked for more debates to go all around the country and so I don’t think we ought to overly parse that.”

This might also help with the elderly Jews… That pastor who annointed Sarah Palin in order to protect her from witches and other things? He also said this about Israelite bankers and how powerful they are:

The second area whereby God wants us, wants to penetrate in our society is in the economic area. The Bible says that the wealth of the wicked is stored up for the righteous. It’s high time that we have top Christian businessmen, businesswomen, bankers, you know, who are men and women of integrity running the economics of our nations. That’s what we are waiting for. That’s part and parcel of transformation. If you look at the — you know — if you look at the Israelites, that’s how they work. And that’s how they are, even today.

It’s at about 1:20 on this video, and comes via Sullivan:

Donald Rosenberg, the Cleveland Plain Dealer classical music critic who has been covering the venerable Cleveland Orchestra for 28 years, has been removed from his beat.

Removing a critic from his beat after 28 years is tantamount to firing him. He’s been reassigned to general “arts and entertainment reporter” and the paper is refusing to explain itself, though in Rosenberg’s account, he was called into the editor’s office and summarily “reassigned” after she accused him of “attacking” the orchestra.

It’s true that Rosenberg was deeply critical of the orchestra’s current conductor, Franz Welser-Möst.

It’s also true that the editor who fired Rosenberg has been at the helm of the paper a single year—and the publisher is on the board of trustees of the orchestra.

Whoa.

Stop, stop, stop.

Just about every critic worth anything has a long list of people lining up at the editor or publisher’s door requesting their removal.

In this case, even the orchestra’s executive director tells the New York Times: “I’ve never read anything in a Rosenberg review that was nonmusical.” He says he didn’t ask for Rosenberg’s removal.

Probably he didn’t have to. When the publisher is on the board of the orchestra, the critic is the one on the outside from the beginning.

I can’t describe how wrong this is.

Welser-Möst has received mixed reviews from other critics as well. On tour in Europe, he gets good response. In New York, so-so. But these reviews are from critics who don’t have to listen to his work every single week. What is a critic supposed to do when he believes, as Rosenberg told the New York Times, that “this is a case of an extraordinary orchestra with an ordinary conductor”? Be quiet about it? Who’s best serving the city, the organization, and the art form then?

Repeated criticisms of the same subject by the same critic can begin to sound shrill. Readers often begin to accuse critics of having ulterior motivations. Critics have to watch out for this—and judging by Rosenberg’s writings, he stayed well on the safe side of this dynamic.

But what is a critic to do when he or she disagrees with the artistic philosophy or doubts the abilities of a conductor, or a museum director, or the head of a theater?

The last time I was in a situation not unlike Rosenberg’s (before his “reassignment,” that is), a colleague who has been in the business far longer than I have pointed out: Editors and publishers don’t mind if you write that this concert was boring and that concert was boring. But if you string it together into institutional critique—hey, everything that director does is boring, and wait, that’s keeping the institution back—then you, the critic, are seen as “on the attack.”

I fear that something like this happened to Don Rosenberg, when he was simply trying to do his job.

At this moment, I’m just glad I don’t work for the Plain Dealer. The paper has embarrassed itself and its city.

Sarah Silverman has a plan for getting all the elderly Jews in Florida to vote for Obama:

The Great Schlep from The Great Schlep on Vimeo.

Brought to you by Jewbutrin. (And Mark Halperin.)

All In a Day’s Work: Obama smacks down McCain for trying to dodge debate, urges Congress to support NASA.

And the Doomsday Clock Ticks Closer To Midnight: Nuclear inspectors barred from North Korean reactor site.

This Is Exactly How Red Dawn Started: Venezuela and China sign massive oil deal.

Dirty: Olympic Committee probing underage Chinese gymnasts.

Republicans: Bush goes prime-time to talk about the economic shit-hole we’re in, Cindy McCain shows up for Seattle fundraiser after all.

Probably Not Republicans: Seattle groups helping homeless register to vote.

But Did He Have a Hung Jury? Oklahoma judge disbarred for using penis pump in court.

Seattle Police have arrested a Seattle man in his 20s for a shooting which took place near Northgate just before 7pm.

When police arrived at the scene of the shooting at 5th Avenue Northeast and Northeast 97th, they found the victim—also in his 20s—lying on the sidewalk, already dead from a gunshot wound to the head.

Police arrested the suspect and recovered a rifle.

Homicide investigators appeared to be coming in and out of an apartment building near the scene.

SPD spokesman Jeff Kappel says police don’t yet know how the men knew each other.

So says SurveyUSA:

Immediately after John McCain’s announcement at 3 pm ET today, Wednesday 09/24/08, that he was suspending his campaign and seeking to postpone Friday’s scheduled presidential debate, SurveyUSA interviewed 1,000 adults nationwide. Key findings:

A majority of Americans say the debate should be held on Friday. Just 10% say the debate should be postponed. A sizable percentage of Americans, 36%, think the focus of the debate should be modified to focus more on the economy. 3 of 4 Americans say the presidential campaigns should continue. Just 14% say the presidential campaigns should be suspended. If Friday’s debate does not take place, 46% of Americans say that would be bad for America.

(Also: This comment thread, covering Katie Couric’s interview of a hapless Sarah “as dumb as a box of hammers and would seem to have the political skills of said box” Palin, is the funniest thing I’ve read in a while.)

In this week’s In the Hall, I wrote about rumors that state Sen. Margarita Prentice (D-11) may lose her chairmanship of the powerful Ways and Means Committee, which handles budgetary matters, when the state legislature reconvenes after the November election. (Prentice is up for reelection, but her challenger, Democrat Juan Martinez, has raised little money and has few endorsements). In the column, I quoted Renton City Council Member Randy Corman, who first published the rumor on his blog.

On his blog, Corman wrote that senate leadership was thinking about ousting Prentice because of her ill-fated efforts to build a $500 million stadium for the Sonics in Renton; because she supports tapping the state “rainy day fund” during a tough reelection year for Governor Christine Gregoire, who supported creating the fund; and because she has supported controversial constituencies like payday lenders and casinos. Corman also accused Prentice of “threaten[ing] to cut support for colleges or children’s charities” whose board members supported her opponent. “Any citizen ought to be able to endorse whoever they like for office without feeling that [the institution they work for] is going to lose money because of their support of a candidate,” Corman says.

I talked to Corman a bit about his blog, which is interesting in large part because it’s obviously uncensored by Renton city officials—unlike, for example, city of Seattle-hosted council member blogs, which must adhere to standards written into city policy. (Whether non-city-sponsored web sites, like Council Members Tim Burgess’s and Bruce Harrell’s, must also adhere to those standards has been a matter of some controversy.)

Right now, Corman’s front page includes posts on Renton’s garbage rates (they’re going up), lousy Renton landlords, and a lawsuit he appears to be involved in—in addition to the gossip about Prentice’s future in the senate. Corman told me that the blog gives him a chance to “say the things I don’t have time to say” at city council meetings. “We want citizens to understand that we’re not rubberstamping things,” Corman said. “The blog relieved that problem.”

I don’t know enough about Renton city politics to know whether that’s just politicking or whether citizens really do use Corman’s blog as a sounding board (he does get comments), but I do know that blogging gives citizens and elected officials another avenue to communicate with each other—an avenue they didn’t previously have. Given how much local government officials talk about being “open and accountable,” it’s hard to see any justification, short of libel concerns, for meddling in what they want to say online.

Capping off a crazy political day, President Bush will address the nation at 6 p.m. PST, re: the financial crisis. Livestream here.

Hump Tip #3

Only 12 more days to make a HUMP! film! People are still trying to find each other HERE. Maybe you have camera, but no actors? Or maybe you have people but no cameraman… either way, it’s not too late. Not yet.

Also, remember that you might not even need a bunch of actors - perhaps you just need ONE, and uh, a bunch of bananas, donuts, peaches, and Twizzlers…

This is so tragic. The ACLU’s infomercial about pot, which cost tens of thousands of dollars to produce, got booted from real TV and now the nonprofit is reduced to showing it on public access.

Using a panel format and clap-on-cue audience, the talk-show-style program encourages people to talk about pot. It is quite bland, really. Nonetheless, KOMO billed thousands of dollars in production costs for recording the show its studio, then refused to air it; KING and KONG would air the program only after 1:00 a.m.

Today, the Seattle Community Access Network, notable for the lowest production values and highest level of raunch in regional television, announced it will air the show at 6:30 p.m. and a live panel discussion at 7:00 p.m. on Comcast channel 77 and Broadstripe channel 23 throughout King County. Sounds… almost as dull as Brokeback Mountain. (You can also view the show online.)

But here’s the thing. People often deride advocates of controversial issues for marginal tactics, like marching or rallying or blogging—generally for not taking a more mainstream tack. Well, the ACLU tried to take the most mainstream approach of all—network television with high-end production values—but network television gave bullshit excuses to reject it. Maybe America’s just not ready for certain mainstream tactics until those rallies earn a bit more respect.

Click over to Best of Mother Earth and find out.

Yummy!

When the un-teleprompted Palin talks, I can’t help but think of that dig from E. M. Forster’s Howards End—the character Helen talking (page 22 of the Penguin edition): “I felt for a moment that the whole Wilcox family was a fraud, just a wall of newspapers and motor-cars and golf-clubs, and that if it fell I should find nothing behind it but panic and emptiness.”

The tragically misnamed Columbia Plaza—an ugly parking lot with a small indoor mall of shops at its western end—will soon be morphing from this…

to this:

The renderings I’ve seen so far don’t include a full front view (i.e., what things will look like from where I was when I took that first shot of Columbia Plaza), but here’s one that includes the ugly-ass Bank of America drive-through building in the front (which, unfortunately, was not sold as part of the development):

There’s a lot I like about this project. Foremost: It will replace one of the worst-used lots in Columbia City—a lot that effectively walls off downtown Columbia City from the Columbia City Park and the renovated Columbia City branch library—with a development that will extend the downtown area to its logical terminus at Alaska Street. All that dead space will be gone (and RIP, Columbia Plaza, but there are plenty of places that sell wares similar to yours right down the street), replaced by retail and (God willing) restaurants, which the growing neighborhood desperately needs. Second: I really dig that the parking is all underground. Granted, that’s kind of a given on a small lot in a dense area, but—if the renderings can be trusted—the parking will be practically invisible. That’s good planning—especially for a building on the street (Edmunds) that Sound Transit’s planning to turn into a pedestrian link to the light rail line a few blocks west on MLK. Third, while I don’t know how much these will sell for, I like that the units are small—between about 500 and 800 square feet, which will (I hope) translate into lower prices than some of the large, two-story luxury lofts that have been going up around the neighborhood. ($725,000-per-unit converted apartment building, I’m looking at you). Finally, if the developers do actually put in a green wall facing the Bank of America, it’ll be an awesome visual fuck-you to a squat gray relic on an increasingly pedestrian-oriented street, making it look more than ever like the out-of-place car-centric anachronism it is.

Now, a few cautionary thoughts: It would be nice if the open space weren’t clustered in the center, where only residents of the building can really access it. Why not next to the park instead? And these drawings show a muted, conservative palette—but will the developer stick to it, or fall prey to the still-trendy “throw a few buckets of primary colors on it and call that massing” school of design? Finally, if there is a “road diet” on Rainier, narrowing the highway-like road from five lanes to four or less, will the developers do something to plan for that? Right now, the side that faces Rainier looks pretty monolithic. That won’t work very well if and when Rainier is narrowed to be more user-friendly for cyclists and pedestrians.

The liveblog is below, but first, if you haven’t already, acquaint yourselves with our debaters:

In the left corner, debating in favor of Barack Obama, Will Erdmann, 26, a concierge at the Best Western Executive Inn in downtown Seattle. He goes by “Homo Will” in the comments.

And in the right corner, debating in favor of John McCain, will be Larry Kaye, 48, son of an Army infantryman, uncle of a Marine, employee at a non-profit cancer research center in Seattle. He goes by “lark” in the comments.

Here we go:

This is getting more ridiculous by the minute.

Still, we are in a serious financial crisis. Which is why I’m suspending “Youth Pastor Watch,” even though I have a couple of really good news stories about errant youth pastors that I could post. But we are facing a serious financial crisis, my friends, even as the fundamentals of our economy are strong. And by “fundamentals,” of course, I mean the American worker, because it’s our workers, and not reading, that is, or are, truly fundamental. So there will be more installments of “Youth Pastor Watch” until Congress delivers the responsible financial bailout that my good friend and campaign manager Rick Davis assures me we need to save our fundamentals’ jobs.

So, again, I’m suspending “Youth Pastor Watch.” What are you going to suspend?

This sounds like it’s in keeping with McCain’s pledge to suspend his campaign. Still, it’s another sign of how McCain is shooting himself in the foot with this maneuver. He has to cancel fundraisers, he gets mocked by Letterman, and meanwhile, his wife has to waste a day in Seattle…

UPDATE: Slog tipper Nat writes in:

KUOW just said that the fundraiser had already happened by the time of the dramatic announcement, and blamed confusion between McCain aides for the announcement that it had been scotched.

Last week John McCain ran an ad accusing Obama of ties to a disgraced mortgage institution. A woman’s voice says: “Who advises him? The Post says it’s Franklin Raines, for ‘advice on mortgage and housing policy.’ Shocking. Under Raines, Fannie Mae committed ‘extensive financial fraud.’”

The Washington Post shot back this retort, saying the ad was “exaggerating wildly.” It turns out, McCain had ties to disgraced financial institutions.

And today the NYT reports that an “outside group” is running ads linking Obama to other disgraced figures. Namely, former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilptrick and Obama’s crazy-as-sin former pastor Jeremiah Wright. (In fairness Obama had a limited relationship with these two, and Obama has run his own disingenuous ads, but none of them come close to the whoppers the GOP seem to be plopping on a near-daily basis.)

All three of the ads have one thing in common, by the way. Each shows Obama and the picture of another African-American man. Do they think it’s more plausible because, like, white voters mistakenly believe all black people know each other? How long till the right-will bullshit brigade runs an ad linking Obama to OJ Simpson?

This complete stiff-arming of McCain’s dash for some imagined political end-zone, this is what happens when:

A) Democrats control both houses of Congress. If Democrats were not in control right now, Harry Reid would not be in a position to torpedo McCain’s overtures, and Barney Frank would not have his perch as Chair of the House Financial Services Committee from which to say (with the considerable import of someone who’s in charge of shepherding the legislation that McCain is supposedly rushing back to D.C. to help hammer out) the following about McCain’s gambit:

It’s the longest Hail Mary pass in the history of either football or Marys.

B) You piss off the media. McCain’s campaign has spent the last few weeks blatantly manipulating, attacking, and otherwise manhandling the media. Political reporters were already protesting, calling the campaign on “lies,” and generally showing their displeasure and distrust. And then McCain pulls a stunt that requires a huge amount of media buy-in to succeed? Not wise.

C) You have a Democratic candidate who, as Charles puts it, is not John Kerry.

I am so glad there’s video of the two candidates dealing with Suspension-gate 2008. Maybe even more than the basic comparison of standing the two men next to each other at a debate, this really highlights the matter of who gives off the feeling of a confident, competent commander-in-chief during a time of crisis.

Who looks more presidential?

or:

Upon reading this…

Rep. Barney Frank, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee and the chief House Democrat negotiating the bailout package, called McCain’s move “the longest Hail Mary pass in the history of either footballs or Marys.

Google gave me this answer:

And from Wikipedia:

A Hail Mary pass or Hail Mary play in American football is a forward pass made in desperation, with only a small chance of success.

This gambit is not going well for McCain. Here’s Drudge’s description of tonight’s Letterman show:

David Letterman tells audience that McCain called him today to tell him he had to rush back to DC to deal with the economy.

Then in the middle of the taping Dave got word that McCain was, in fact just down the street being interviewed by Katie Couric. Dave even cut over to the live video of the interview, and said, “Hey Senator, can I give you a ride home?”

Earlier in the show, Dave kept saying, “You don’t suspend your campaign. This doesn’t smell right. This isn’t the way a tested hero behaves.” And he joked: “I think someone’s putting something in his metamucil.”

“He can’t run the campaign because the economy is cratering? Fine, put in your second string quarterback, Sara Palin. Where is she?”

“What are you going to do if you’re elected and things get tough? Suspend being president? We’ve got a guy like that now!”

So Clay Aiken has finally come out as a homosexual—an unsurprising admission to everyone in the world, right?

Unfortunately, the only people surprised by the news of Clay’s gayness are his biggest fans—Claymates, they call themselves, and they’ve spent the past seven years believing, trusting, and parroting Aiken’s claims that no way is he gay.

Now the Claymates’ mighty lord and savior has confessed the truth, and my beloved Radar has done the webby legwork—on Clay Aiken fan-sites’ message boards, primarily—to find out how the Claymates are dealing. It’s not pretty.

“This is a gut wrenching day for The ClayNation. Somebody wake me up, I hope it’s a dream.” strollynn63 at The Clayboard

“I’ve cried a river of tears and truthfully do not know where I stand right now. I am envious of those who can take this news and continue to state their unconditional love and support for Clay.” Clayncfan at The Clayboard

If Brokeback Mountain taught us anything (besides “Ang Lee is a genius” and “Heath Ledger was a rare talent”), it’s that the only thing sadder than closet cases are the women duped into loving them. Happy healing, Claymates, and thanks, Radar.

Tcritic reports that a Colorado 5th grader was suspended for wearing this t-shirt to school:

Though the design of the shirt leaves much to be desired, at least the boy should be applauded for his proper spelling, unlike his older conservative compatriots:

The boy’s father says that the school is “full of liberal loons.” Whatever happened to kids rebelling against their parents?

After spending three weeks in the hospital with severe leg burns, Martha Manning, co-owner of Seattle’s only lesbian bar, the Wildrose, is being released later today. Manning was at a gas station on Capitol Hill September 4 when an SUV careened into a gas pump that blew up upon impact.

“She had to have skin grafts on both ankles, her lower legs, and feet,” says Wildrose co-owner Shelly Brothers. Manning’s right leg is also in a cast to protect her damaged Achilles tendon.

Before medics could rescue her, Manning first rescued her Chihuahua, Honey, who was sitting in Manning’s car before flames charred the pumps and the surrounding vehicles. The unscathed, five-pound pooch now stars in the poster for Manning’s benefit concert next week:

Poster via.

The all-volunteer lineup for the October 1 show at Chop Suey includes Leslie and the Lys, Team Gina, Precious Moments, and several DJs. If you can’t attend the benefit but still want to contribute to Manning’s recovery fund, you can drop off a check at the Wildrose or make a deposit to the “Martha Manning Fund” at any Bank of America location. The show will also feature a silent auction, including karate lessons and a gift bag from Babeland. Bidders should bring a cash or a checkbook.

Proceeds from the benefit will go toward Manning’s medical bills and other expenses while she is unable to work. “It is such a huge bill that insurance won’t cover it all,” Brothers says. “We have no idea how long it will be before she can get back to work.”

In the meantime, Wildrose staff have been shuffling their schedules to make up for Manning’s absence at the busy bar, Brothers says. “We all miss her.”

Now we know the real difference. We know why now is not the same as the last time. If this stunt had been pulled on Kerry, he would have fallen for it so hard:

Republican Sen. John McCain said Wednesday he’s suspending his presidential campaign and directing his staff to work with Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign to try and delay Friday’s scheduled debate because of the economic crisis. Obama said that the debate should go forward as scheduled and said he had no plans to suspend his campaign.

The video of Kenyan pastor Thomas Muthee praying over Sarah Palin at the Wasilla Assembly of God church has resurfaced, and holy crap, what a video it is. Some choice excerpts:

In a moment I’ll be asking you to pray for Sarah… I tell you something, if all we do is get people to the church and get them saved… I don’t think much will happen in our society. There are people who are wired to politics, because God wants to take the political, you know, dimension of our societies. Those people should be prayed for, and that’s why I was so glad to see Sarah here. We should pray for her. We should buck her up. And come the day of voting we should not just pray for her, we should be there. … If the believers had not done something in this country, your president would not be in office today.

We need believers who are educationists. If we hired them today, we would not be talking about the ten commandments being kicked… out of the schools. They would still be there. We need god taking over our education system. If we have God in our schools, we will not have our kids being taught how to worship Buddha, how to worship Muhammad. We will not have in the curriculum witchcraft and sorcery. …

We need believers [in government]. We need men and women of integrity… people that are born-again, spirit-filled people who know God and people who are serious with God. So in a moment… I’ll ask Sarah to come up. Please let’s stand up, and let’s hold hands all over this house. …

[Palin walks up to the front of the chapel; two men flank her and lay hands on her, as does Muthee.]

Give her the personnel. Give her men and women that will buck her up. In the name of Jesus, we want righteousness in this state, we want righteousness in this nation… so that the curse that has been on them can be broken. … In the name of Jesus, every form of witchcraft is what we rebuke.

Watch it:

I think it would be totally presidential if John McCain’s went ahead and suspended his presidency right now. Desperate times, desperate measures, etc.

Obama time:

“This is the exact time when the American people need to hear from the person who in 40 days will be responsible for this mess,” he said. “It is more important than ever to present ourselves to the American people.”

And now it’s official:

Pilgrim Congregational Church will open its doors to dogs and cats, parrots and parakeets, and any other animal people want to bring to a blessing of the animals at 5 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 5.

One exception—no pit bulls. The church’s insurance policy won’t let them through the door because of their reputation, deserved or not, for being aggressive.

“It’s unfortunate, we didn’t want to have any restrictions,” said Alana Snyder, a church member. “We’re thinking of ways of getting people into the church and Weymouth is a community focused on dogs.”

Don’t know how they got that reputation. In other pit bull news: pit bulls running loose kill two dogs in Pennsylvania; police dog attacked by pair of pit bulls in British Columbia; pit bulls attack wheelchair-bound man and his three year-old son in Tennessee; pregnant woman in Maine upset that her two pit bulls were put to sleep after escaping from her home and attacking a neighbor’s dog; pit bull in Florida shot to death after it attacks an elderly man, his granddaughter, and a police officer; woman’s new pit bull attacks her three year-old son in New Zealand, ripping large chunk of flesh from the boy’s arm.

Last word to an animal control officer in New Zealand:

“No animal control officers trust pit bulls. They’re not like other dogs. I’m not sure why people get dogs like this. I mean, what is the need for a dog like that? They were specifically bred for fighting other dogs. When you get a pit bull biting, it’s a lot more severe. Because their jaws are so powerful, they actually take a chunk out. Other breeds will take a nip then run off.”

Bigot!

I understand that the candidates are putting together a joint statement at Senator Obama’s suggestion. But it would not be helpful at this time to have them come back during these negotiations and risk injecting presidential politics into this process or distract important talks about the future of our nation’s economy. If that changes, we will call upon them. We need leadership; not a campaign photo op.

First: What in the fuck is the McCain campaign thinking? No good can come from adding political instability on top of the financial crisis. The election should go as absolute clockwork, with every step happening on time and as planned. I’m getting more and more concerned about the health of the US Treasury’s financial reputation if stunts like this continue.

But McCain wants to take a break to think about how to handle the financial crisis? Fine.

The more I read about this bailout fiasco, the more I dislike it. (For now, support Dodd and the congressional democrats, who are at least trying to protect your financial interests as a taxpayer.)

Much has been made of the Sweden model.

Sweden did not just bail out its financial institutions by having the government take over the bad debts. It extracted pounds of flesh from bank shareholders before writing checks. Banks had to write down losses and issue warrants to the government.

That strategy held banks responsible and turned the government into an owner. When distressed assets were sold, the profits flowed to taxpayers, and the government was able to recoup more money later by selling its shares in the companies as well.

The AIG “bailout” was in this vein—and the Dodd plan asks for more of the same.

I think we should grab the regulatory meat cleaver and forcibly recreate the regulations of the Glass-Steagal act—separating by regulatory force (the dispensable) investment banks from the (essential for the economy) commercial and retail banks. Right now. Investment banks are, in my mind, useless drags on our real economy. Why should we allow them to be tied to the critical banking functions done by banks making loans to corporations and individuals (the real drivers of the economy)?

Of course, the government is busy doing the exact opposite—forcing these investment banks to become bullshit commercial banks, further eroding worldwide confidence in the US banks we actually need to save the useless casino banks that created this whole mess in the first place. Write to your representative right now, telling them to cut this crap out.

If we’re throwing around hundreds of billions of dollars to save institutions of questionable societal value, might I suggest the following bailouts to regular people?

1. Extend Medicare to everyone. Eliminate the age floor and instantly create a national healthcare system. This would cost less than the AIG bailout (for the next year) and help every responsible company (that has to pay for health insurance) in the US economy become more competitive.

A lot of people are about to lose their jobs, if this continues. We might as well ease this by finally ridding ourselves of the crumbling and already failed employer-based health care system.

2. Massively boost funding to the governmental student loan programs. If you really want to be smart, even pay off a bunch of student loans (for people who did the right thing, but cannot get jobs because the economy is taildiving.)

3. Make it easier for people to avoid bankruptcy, and easier to get out of bankruptcy if they do fall.

That means rolling back the draconian bankruptcy bill forced on us by the credit industry (the people who created this crisis), renegotiating mortgage terms to payments people can make (something last done during the Great Depression), giving those with high-interest credit card debt access to low-interest government loans (allowing them to finally pay down the principle.)

If we’re doing it for poorly managed banks, we should do it for common US citizens. A little bit of amnesty to our fellow Americans could save us all a ton of money and headache.

4. Create the Complement Cooperative.

(Read that link, or this one to include the slog discussion when I first wrote about the concept. This might be the smartest idea I’ve had.)

Your wishlist?

Broadway producers are working on making American Psycho: the Musical a reality. I think this is a great idea, and I hope they bring the trial run to Seattle, as they’ve done with Shrek. Also, I hope they can somehow convince Christian Bale to reprise his film role. His performance made American Psycho, in my opinion, one of the few book-to-film adaptations that completely blows away its source material in terms of quality.

There was a moment in the influential California artist Robert Irwin’s artistic life—documented in Lawrence Weschler’s classic book Seeing Is Forgetting the Thing One Sees (my love letter to the 25-year-old book here; the new 25th-anniversary special edition can be pre-ordered in hardback for $31.50 here or in paperback for $16.47 here)—when Irwin realized he was looking around.

He was painting one or two thin lines across a canvas, and kept moving them up or down just slightly until they felt absolutely right. It could take weeks to get one line in the right place. And then, when they were perfect, he realized he had another dilemma: they were only perfect in his studio, where they were made. The placements of the lines depended on the room around them, not just the white space of the rest of the canvas. Irwin realized that, for him, art doesn’t stand alone. He was making art in relation to what was around it.

Well, once you start bringing architecture or space into the experience of art, you might as well bring in time, too. That’s the idea behind New York-based artist Wade Kavanaugh’s new installation at Suyama Space, in which the bumps of land that were leveled off in the Denny Regrade at the turn of the 20th century reappear in rough, ghostly form indoors.

The bricks that make up the mounds are handmade from scraps of salvaged drywall layered together like wafers. The choice of drywall makes it as if the artist is imagining the walls of the gallery deconstructing into the shape of the former land on the site.

The rough, sandblasted surfaces of the bricks—there are 10,000 of them, according to the artist—and their subtle spectrum of color due to the original uses of the pieces of drywall make the piece visually engrossing, especially when seen from slightly above, on the staircase adjoining the gallery.

Unfortunately, Kavanaugh had to deal with several egresses from the room (four exit doors, two bathroom doors, and a fire escape, if you can believe it), so there are too many paths through the land forms, and the movement aspect of the experience feels unresolved.

Before you head down there (the show’s up through December 12), listen to Kavanaugh talk about the genesis of his idea, what the colors tell you, and what he does with all this material when he’s finished.

Take it away, Wade.

Crocodile PR spokeswoman Kerri Harrop:

Before the rumor mill starts going bananas, I just want to give you all a heads up and let you know that Eli Anderson has been hired as the Talent Buyer for the club, and Roy Atizado has been hired as Director of Live Entertainment.

To read the entire press release, go to Line Out.

Assuming realpolitik and rationality underly McCain’s big move today (and not panicked reactivity or plain old unthinking impulsiveness), I wonder if this is what McCain sees as his desired progression of events:

1) McCain suspends his campaign to focus on the economy, calls on Obama to do same, calls for postponing of the Friday debate.

2) Obama says no, that he can focus on both the economy and a foreign policy debate, and that McCain should be able to as well.

3) McCain says he’s more committed to the people’s business than show-business, says if Obama really wanted to debate so badly he could have accepted all of McCain’s town hall meeting overtures over the last few months, and says he’s not going to the Florida debate because he’s putting “country first.”

4) Obama stands his ground. The debate doesn’t happen because McCain’s not there. Only two presidential debates are left. Therefore McCain has one less chance to blow it.

Sounds a little odd as a type it—wouldn’t an “underdog” want more opportunities to share a stage with the big guy, not fewer? But nothing about this campaign has been normal so far…

Still on for 4 p.m. No postponement due to economic crisis. No flying back to D.C. Details here.

Gay-lesbian titles donated to Wasilla Library.

Responding to news reports about then-Wasilla Mayor Sarah Palin asking a librarian how she would feel about banning books, a San Francisco man has donated two children’s books dealing with homosexuality to the Wasilla Library.

Mike Petrelis, a 49-year-old who files Freedom of Information requests for a living, said he was aghast to read reports of Palin’s 1996 inquiry about banning certain books at Wasilla’s library.

The news — old news in the Mat-Su Valley, but new in the Lower 48 — prompted Petrelis to send to Wasilla “Heather Has Two Mommies” and “Daddy’s Roommate,” both children’s books that explain gay lifestyle.

“I said, ‘I’m going to send copies of both books just to make sure they’re on the shelves,’” Petrelis said.

I think we all should fall in love with Mike Petrelis a little bit right now.

(Thanks to Slog tipper Davida.)

Which means, as they say in the nonpolitical world, it’s on.

No official reaction yet from Obama himself—the “debate is on” quote is just from a senior campaign official. But if ABC’s report is right, and if it’s representative of where Obama is going with this, his reaction is similar to my first reaction.

Obama supporter and chief debate negotiator Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., told MSNBC that “we can handle both,” when asked about his reaction to McCain’s call to postpone the first debate because of the administration’s bailout plan.

Don’t believe it.

First of all, the SurveyUSA poll identified Rossi as “Republican Dino Rossi.” As the recent Elway poll confirmed, describing Rossi as “Dino Rossi, who prefers the GOP Party” gives Rossi a three-point boost—a boost that would put him above Gregoire in the SurveyUSA poll, though still within the margin of error. That’s why the Washington State Democrats are suing to force Rossi to correctly identify himself as a Republican—because the label “GOP Party” confuses so-called low-information voters. In June, another Elway poll revealed that fully 25 percent of likely voters didn’t know that “GOP” meant Republican, and seven percent thought it referred to the Democratic Party. A court hearing in that case is scheduled for 9:00 Friday morning, in King County Superior Court Judge Richard Eadie’s courtroom.

Republicans, far more than Democrats, are capitalizing on this confusion. According to the state Democratic Party, 31 candidates on state general election ballots have identified as something other than a Democrat or a Republican. Of those, 27 are claiming to belong to the “GOP Party,” the “Grand Old Party,” or the “R Party”; just one Democrat has identified as a member of the “Progressive Dem Party.” (A Green, an Independent, and a Libertarian round out the roster.)

Perhaps more importantly, Rossi is proving himself to be a far more robust, compelling candidate than Gregoire this time around. Much as she did four years ago, Gregoire is running a lackluster, defensive campaign—painting Rossi as a right-wing monster, pitting him against crying moms, and associating him with George W. Bush. Meanwhile, Rossi comes across as calm, soothing, and folksy—the antithesis of Gregoire’s agitated, alarmist, out-of-touch-with-regular-folks persona.

At the gubernatorial debate last Saturday, for example, Gregoire smiled condescendingly and stuck to her speaking points in her answers to nearly every question. Rossi, in contrast, used folksy anecdotes about his daughter’s allowance (“little Jillian”) and his “small-business background” (“I started out with $200 in the bank and a $200 car and nowhere to go but up”) to avoid answering questions—a dodgy tactic that might not have worked so well had Rossi not seemed so world-weary, honest, and direct. Never mind that he frequently was lying—about Gregoire planning to raise voters’ taxes; about the size of the state’s budget deficit; about his position on stem-cell research. Rossi sounded like he was telling the truth. In the 30-second-sound-bite format of a televised debate, the appearance of honesty matters more than honesty itself.

And Gregoire, in contrast, sounded nervous and canned. Even when she was talking up her blue-collar roots—”When you grow up with a short-order cook and you’re making ends meet, you know how important a job is“—Gregoire sounded stiff, defensive, and out of touch. (Note to Gregoire’s campaign consultants: Please coach her in the proper use of the word “literally.” our nation is not “literally on its knees.”) She also repeated herself too often and too angrily, throwing around phrases like “green-collar jobs,” “I just don’t believe that’s the values of the people of the state of Washington,” and “the failed policies of the George W. Bush administration” like talismans to ward off Rossi’s slick, smooth-talking charm. Instead of going on the attack, Gregoire stayed on the defensive, passing up opportunities to take specific stands on issues like the viaduct (“we’re saying, what do we do, literally, from I-5 to the waterfront”), taxes (“absolutely nobody is talking about taxes in the state of Washington except my opponent”), spending priorities (“It’s called priorities of government budget setting”), and economic development (“there’s a lot of good work being done there.”)

Seattle may have a lot of Gregoire signs—I saw a half-dozen on my way to work this morning—but in Eastern Washington, north of Everett, and Pierce County, Rossi’s support is strong. If Gregoire wants to hold on to her job, she’s going to have to do a lot more than snipe that Rossi’s distorting her record—she’s going to have to make the case that her record makes her worth keeping.

Sneaky:

The Obama campaign said Obama had called McCain around 8:30 a.m. Wednesday to propose that they issue a joint statement in support of a package to help fix the economy as soon as possible. McCain called back six hours later and agreed to the idea of the statement, the Obama campaign said. McCain’s statement [suspending his campaign and calling for a postponement of the debate] was issued to the media a few minutes later.

Will someone please give this motherf*cker one of those little gold-and-lucite statuettes that says Employee of the Month?

^{Hat tip to Uncle Vinny!}

Wii Sex? We’re getting there:

The Dark Room Sex Game is a rhythm game of sorts—shake your Wii Remote with the second player with a sense of mutual rhythm, and you win. No graphics—only horny audio cues indicate whether you’re “thrusting” at the right pace or not. Though it’s silly, it’s actually a genius twist on rhythm games—rather than steadily pressing buttons, you’re forced to invent your own rhythm and then dynamically change it alongside another player. Makes Rock Band look pedestrian. (By the way, this game’s not for the Wii; you have to trick your PC into recognizing your Wii controllers for this to work. Sorry, grandma.)

Though this game is available as a free download, you might prefer to wait until October 10th to see a crowd embarrass themselves with it. The game will be publicly demoed with 24 other indie-gaming contest finalists at the IndieCade International Festival of Independent Games, held this year at Bellevue’s Open Satellite gallery space. The main festival lasts two days, while the indie game competition will stay at the space until October 17th.

Sadly, the festival is pricing its panels and talks out of mainstream attendance—$250 for a full pass? Yeesh. But the week-long game showcase will be open for only $10/day, which is perfect. It costs that much to play for maybe ten minutes at GameWorks—and the games here will be infinitely cooler. In the past year, IndieCade has vetted recent indie hits like Braid, N+, and Everyday Shooter before the rest of us caught on, so there should be at least a couple of soon-to-be-smashes at Open Satellite’s showcase just down the block. In a few minutes of perusing the competitors, I’ve already been blown away by The Unfinished Swan, in which you have to paint the world in front of you to reveal your path and solve puzzles. Might not be refined as a full game yet, but their proof of concept is dazzling.

IndieCade hasn’t yet posted the full list of competitors, but gaming blog Joystiq apparently has the list, as they’re posting impressions of the games every day this week. I’ll be sure to get my grubby hands on the games next month as well.

This is the second big indie-games competition around town in as many months—the other one, the PAX 10, finally announced its winner this week. No shocker to me, The Maw took top honors. This cartoony delight will see retail release in the first half of 2009 on downloadable services like Xbox Live. Other runners-up at the PAX 10, particularly the genius magnet-puzzler Polarity, will be showcased at IndieCade as well.

PAX was swept under the rug by outlets and people alike as a niche festival, but the event’s focus on indie gaming was quite telling. If IndieCade can follow up on the momentum, who’s to say Seattle won’t look more attractive as a region that appreciates and encourages the next wave of small game developers—the ones who take chances with ideas like multi-touch Tetris and journalists embedded in Palestine?

The market’s changing because of downloadable games—from games on mobile phones to money-sucking MMOs that are flattening the rest of the market. Cheaper, humbler, and smarter games will be the inevitable future. Fests like this give our city a chance to claim dibs on this new kind of “indie.” Or, at the very least, to shake Wii remotes and moan in public.

More details: McCain is apparently suspending his campaign, heading back to Washington D.C. to be available to hammer out a bailout plan, and calling on Obama to do the same.

The statement, via the siren-flashing Drudge:

America this week faces an historic crisis in our financial system. We must pass legislation to address this crisis. If we do not, credit will dry up, with devastating consequences for our economy. People will no longer be able to buy homes and their life savings will be at stake. Businesses will not have enough money to pay their employees. If we do not act, ever corner of our country will be impacted. We cannot allow this to happen.

Last Friday, I laid out my proposal and I have since discussed my priorities and concerns with the bill the Administration has put forward. Senator Obama has expressed his priorities and concerns.This morning, I met with a group of economic advisers to talk about the proposal on the table and the steps that we should take going forward.I have also spoken with members of Congress to hear their perspective.

It has become clear that no consensus has developed to support the Administration’ proposal. I do not believe that the plan on the table will pass as it currently stands, and we are running out of time.

Tomorrow morning, I will suspend my campaign and return to Washington after speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative. I have spoken to Senator Obama and informed him of my decision and have asked him to join me.

I am calling on the President to convene a meeting with the leadership from both houses of Congress, including Senator Obama and myself. It is time for both parties to come together to solve this problem.

We must meet as Americans, not as Democrats or Republicans, and we must meet until this crisis is resolved.I am directing my campaign to work with the Obama campaign and the commission on presidential debates to delay Friday night’s debate until we have taken action to address this crisis.

I am confident that before the markets open on Monday we can achieve consensus on legislation that will stabilize our financial markets, protect taxpayers and homeowners, and earn the confidence of the American people. All we must do to achieve this is temporarily set politics aside, and I am committed to doing so.

Following September 11th, our national leaders came together at a time of crisis. We must show that kind of patriotism now. Americans across our country lament the fact that partisan divisions in Washington have prevented us from addressing our national challenges. Now is our chance to come together to prove that Washington is once again capable of leading this country.

It’s easy to see what McCain is trying to do here: Take the initiative, appear presidential, one-up Obama’s rhetoric of “coming together to solve big problems,” and put Obama in a box of either being for the debate or against quick action to steady the economy.

Obama needs to get out of this trap, and quick. He needs to agree or, as I suggested at first blush, strongly disagree—and he needs to do it soon, before a conventional wisdom develops around McCain’s move. The longer Obama waits, the more likely the conventional wisdom about McCain’s move is going to become: Bold, bi-partisan, politically shrewd, game-changing, initiative-grabbing, presidential.

Man, I can’t remember the last time I was actually proud of Congress.

More, please.

In the books section, Tori Centanni reviews Waiter Rant. The review ends:

…if Dublanica can transcend his “cynical server ranting!” gimmick—which will be difficult, considering publishing’s tendency to pigeonhole bloggers—he has the potential to become a talented humorous essayist or novelist.

On his blog, Dublanica announces his next book:

Titled At Your Service, I’ll be going “undercover” to investigate the dynamics of tipping across the service industry. And I won’t just be writing about waiters mind you, but nail technicians, maids, furniture movers, strippers, taxi drivers, bellhops, and everyone who counts on the erratic generosity of the American public to make ends meet.

Whenever possible, I will actually do the work these people perform. (Obviously not the stripper job – unless I get a good personal trainer.) I’ll share their burdens, suffer their indignities, learn their dreams, and describe how they screw with the people who forget to tip them. If you’ve ever worried about how much to tip the concierge at a fancy hotel, your doorman at Christmas, the hair colorist at the salon, or the bathroom attendant at the nightclub - this book will be for you!

I’m kind of excited about this (in part because people—including certain people who occasionally comment on this very blog—need to learn how to fucking tip) but I kind of also feel bad for Dublanica. Is he going to become the Morgan Spurlock of the service industry? How long can he stretch that gimmick out for? Should I stop worrying about how well-compensated authors are going to make their living five to ten years down the line?

Breaking… and unbelievable.

The argument is, apparently, that the candidates need to focus on the economic crisis.

But what is needed from Obama and McCain regarding the economic crisis, other than what they are already doing? (Which is making speeches, making their positions clear, and making themselves available for Senate votes if need be.)

Hard to know how this will play, but Obama has an opportunity here to say something like: “No way. If you want to be Commander in Chief, you need to be able to juggle foreign policy and economic policy at the same time. I’m ready to juggle both, and I’m ready to debate on Friday evening. I won’t take my eye off the economic crisis, and I’ll do everything I can to move the appropriate bills forward. But the American people deserve a debate on all of the issues affecting them, and they’ve been looking forward this debate. I have been too. This election is too important to postpone a discussion of the issues, and I hope John McCain changes his mind.”

…but that doesn’t make it any less upsetting: The 2009 Naked Clown Calendar (SFW).

Thank you, Fleshbot (NSFW).

Do you like movies? And candy? And data entry*?

Apply to be my intern. Here. The film section needs you!

*Especially data entry.

This blog made me laugh and laugh. The images (a topless woman) and the words (concerning the customs of Zanzibarians—“When offering or accepting things, try and remember to offer and receive with your right hand. This is the hand which should also be used for eating.” ) are not consistent.

As for this prize:

..it’s a part of a very long tradition:

^{Chauney Peck’s Love Seat (2008), vinyl on wall, 40 by 53 inches}

At 4Culture. (Gallery site here. The show is only up through Friday, so get down there soon.)

Last week I posted a “Currently Hanging” about a promising young Seattle artist that turned into a heated debate about whether I’d left the artist high and dry by only referring obliquely to why I thought his work was promising. But! That will be followed up with a full review of his work in the paper coming out today, so stay tuned and leave your further comments on that story.

In the case of this artist, Chauney Peck, there isn’t time for a full review in the paper. Her show closes Friday and I just got to see it yesterday (I’m sorry! I was out of town!). So I’ll try to explain why I think she’s also on the move.

When I first saw her work two years ago at SOIL (here’s her web site, to look at some older work), it struck me as interesting but too light, too cute.

Her new work is darker in subject matter—mostly she’s depicting piles of castoff stuff you might find on a sidewalk or in a temporary housing camp—and it’s more of a technical highwire act. What I mean by that is that she’s not using three dimensions, only the very thin layering of strips of vinyl, so the tension is heightened between flat abstract patterns (think Matisse’s cutouts meet Whiting Tennis’s anthropomorphic architecture) and the illusion that the objects are actually fat and taking up space.

What really excites me, though, is the change in tone, from sweet to aware-that-there’s-a-housing-crisis-going-on. You can’t look at these things without thinking of the sorry state of the country, about the fact that it’s only in times of great crisis that we recognize that, for some people, crisis is a constant state. Here’s a perfect piece of contemporary patriotism, titled Flagship:

I hope I’m describing this well. With the tone shift (those faint, non-cartoonish stains on the right arm of the love seat are an indicator of that shift, for example) comes another profound change in Peck’s work: She often depicts a tent or a blanket covering something up. When the work was overly endearing, I didn’t think much about what might be under the blankets or behind the tarps. But in this show, you do worry about what’s under there. A couple more images on the jump.

Continue reading "Currently Hanging" »

Gregoire is up—but within the margin of error—in the latest SurveyUSA poll.

Slop tipper Scott spotted this Gregoire yard sign in the window at Oasis “bubble tea” house at 6th and Weller in the International District.

OK, so Obama is now spending more than ever on TV ads—why isn’t he making better ones? Or (if he can’t make ads against Sarah Palin because that will drag him down or whatever) why isn’t some other group making better ones for him? MoveOn? What are you doing? Other than emailing people asking them to buy T-shirts? The latest ads from the Obama camp are milquetoasty montages of him smiling and walking with guys in hardhats and stuff. Meanwhile, Sarah Palin is so unqualified for president, so unable to hold her own, that she’s being walled off from reporters. She gave a gaffe-ridden interview to Charles Gibson, and an interview to right-wing ideologue, and that’s it. Where is the the ad that says, in a confident voiceover, “It’s been almost a month since Sarah Palin was chosen to be a heartbeat away from the presidency. She has only taken questions from one member of the mainstream press, and a lot of the stuff she said was uninformed or untrue.” Quick cut montage of the Bush Doctrine question, the “thanks but no thanks” lie, etc. More voiceover: “Her campaign is afraid of something. They’re afraid America is going to discover just how unqualified she is. If she can’t handle question from CNN or NBC or the Washington Post, how is she going to be able to deal with these guys?” And then flash photos of Putin, Ahmadinejad, bin Laden, etc.

Is no one working on an ad like this?

It looks like the doodlings of a teenager who recently discovered LSD.

But it’s clearly inspired by these:

Jen Graves was more thoughtful about the work.

(Dan Savage: Stop reading this post right now.)

Via FiveThirtyEight.com:

There’s something funny going on over at Intrade with respect to the pricing of the Obama and McCain contracts.

Right now, Obama is trading at 52.3 points. That is, Intrade implies that he has a 52.3 percent chance to become the next President….

In fact, the Intrade pricing doesn’t even seem to be internally consistent. If you look at their pricing in individual states, they have Obama at no lower than 60 percent or so in each of the Kerry states, as well as in Iowa, Colorado and New Mexico. And Virginia, Nevada and Ohio are all at about 50:50. The relationships between the odds of winning any given state and the odds of winning the electoral college are difficult to determine, but I’m pretty sure that Obama should be higher than 51.5 percent given those parameters….

….every so often, some individual trader or some small group of traders are shorting all the Obama contacts in bulk and resetting the entire market….

What’s a little weird, however, is that this rouge trader is not only selling Obama contracts and buying McCain contracts …. they also seem to be buying Hillary Clinton contracts…

While I agree with Nate Silver that this probably isn’t a sign that Obama is about to be harmed—Biden contracts have stayed steady—this is the first bit of information that got me a bit concerned.

This has nothing to do with politics, per se. I just love what a classic of the genre this ad is—the plant worker, the pack-a-day voice, the southern accent, the name (Lilly Ledbetter!), the anger, the smooth shiv slipping, and the not-very-subtle attempt to appeal to two key groups of voters (working class whites and working class women).

The same way the cooler air is putting me in a fall mood, this ad is putting me in election season mood:

World leaders, apparently, are totally pissed that the US is bailing out its own banking system. This, after the US (via the Chicago School) has spent decades telling other countries (especially Third World countries) to not subsidize their failing economies, to let banks fail and markets go bananas, in order to instill market discipline.

First, let your banks go against the wall, they said, and then we’ll give you some aid.

Now that the US is ignoring its own advice, world leaders are carpe-ing the diem and wondering aloud whether the US hasn’t been wrong about free-market discipline all along.

The secretary general of the UN, Ban Ki Moon:

“The global financial crisis endangers all our work… We need a new understanding on business ethics and governance, with more compassion and less uncritical faith in the ‘magic’ of markets.”

The president of France:

President Nicolas Sarkozy of France described the crisis as the worst financial mess since the Depression and the financial system as “insane.”

The president of Brazil:

“We must not allow the burden of the boundless greed of a few to be shouldered by all,” President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil said in an opening speech Tuesday that reflected the tone of the [UN] gathering.

The minister from Britain politely noted that the US bailing itself out would be in everyone’s best interest—but the rest of the world is hopping mad.

Bungling in Iraq, bungling our economy, and North Korea giving us the finger by restarting its weapons program and barring inspectors—the US is losing leverage by the day.

Music

The Ruby Suns

• See what else is happening in Music on Wednesday »

Chow

Poppy

• More restaurant reviews in Get Out »

_{T-shirt from Sarah Utter at Buy Olympia.}

The Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers’ Association introduced their “new” slogan at a recent poorly attended convention held in Colorado Springs. The term should be familiar to anyone who’s ever shopped at Urban Outfitters: Reading Is Sexy. Apparently, the words—which are the exact same words that appear on t-shirts and tote bags available for sale everywhere—are accompanied by a silhouette of a ‘sexy’ woman. No photo accompanies this story, but I hope it’s the mudflap girl, since that too would be totally original.

The best part of the story is this passage:

MPIBA president Andy Nettell, co-owner of Arches Book Company in Moab, UT, told PW that he originally objected to the design, which was first printed on stickers. “I initially didn’t think it was appropriate,” he said, “Then we sold 250 stickers in a few months. I saw it was only women who were buying them – mostly librarians – who would pick them up by the stack. That sold me and I stopped worrying about the image.”

Classy, classy mountains and plains booksellers. Always on the cutting edge.

Three responses to this week’s column.

You told WWM, the woman whose boyfriend wanted sex more often than she did, that she should “commit to being his full-blown sex partner once a week and his life-size, ambulatory masturbatory aide at least three times a week.”

I’m sure you’ll get plenty of angry letters, so I won’t bother going off on you; I’ll just tell you that my first boyfriend basically had that idea, and I was young and trying to feel adventurous, so I went with it. My self-respect was trashed. I fucked around (with his blessing) and ruined a bunch of relationships that should have been just friends; looking back, while I know I can’t blame my behavior on anyone else, I think a big reason was that I was having so much unsatisfying sex with him—emotionally as well as physically. He claimed to love me, then pulled shit like waiting till I fell asleep so he could fuck me in the ass—the one thing we rarely did otherwise, because as hard as I tried to be his sex toy, he did not do a good job at all of easing into it, and it hurt. Even when he wasn’t doing such despicable shit, he acted like he owned my body, and I put up with it, because I accepted that role for myself.

Now, granted, my ex was a deluded creep with no social skills, but I don’t see any difference between the way he treated me and what you’re advising for WWM and her boyfriend. He can masturbate; if his hand isn’t good enough he can hit up the local sex toy shop. If she wants to increase her libido somehow, more power to her, but advising her to have sex that isn’t physically satisfying to her won’t do anyone any good; it’s even worse than the twice-a-week compromise. No one’s satisfied. I am all for being GGG and satisfying your partner and having lots of sex, but it should be good sex. Having crappy sex will just cheapen it, and taking on the role of “masturbatory aide” will just humiliate her. I assume her boyfriend isn’t physically disabled, and knows how to get himself off. There’s no reason she needs to do it for him.

Nobody’s Right Hand

I don’t see the connection between your ex-boyfriend’s behavior and my suggestion that WWM help her boyfriend out now and then when he’s horny. Allowing a partner to nuzzle your breasts or crotch while he has a wank in no way compares to fucking someone in the ass while she’s asleep.

But you’re correct, NRH, when you insist that my suggestion for WWM and her boyfriend would amount to “unsatisfying sex.” Taking ten minutes to rub one out would be unsatisfying sex—if it were sex, which it’s not. It’s masturbation—that’s what I called it, NRH, and that’s what it is. And having a wank in the arms/under the ass/at the knees of an indulgent, upbeat, not-into-it-now-but-generally-into-you boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse/whatever is perfectly satisfying masturbation, as masturbation goes.

And helping someone out under those circumstances—he’s horny, you’re not—can be a loving, giving thing to do, not a demeaning, self-negating thing to do.

Look, I’m sorry you had a shitty boyfriend, and I wish you nothing but good, decent, respectful sex partners in the future. But you’re comparing loving, indulgent apples to abusive, obnoxious oranges here, NRH.

Your response to WWM was good, although you might have let her off a little too easy. First off, the best response to a SO asking nicely for more sex is not to cry. She obviously sees this as something important, and yet every time she makes sure that he feels bad about asking. And I would have been more forceful on the patience aspect for both of them. After 10 years of wondering whether marriage meant once-a-month sex, my wife hit 31 and now she’s the one begging me for sex day and night. Finally Fulfilled

Like I said to WWM in my response: “If you’ve been to the doc and ruled out a hormonal imbalance, WWM, and made sure that whatever birth-control method you’re using isn’t decimating your libido, your best bet is to accept that this is the way you work for now—you may surprise yourself when you hit your sexual peak—and find some middle ground.”

I’ve heard from lots of women over the years who had low libidos and no kinks to speak of in their teens and early 20s. Then they hit 30 and all hell breaks loose. (Good hell!) Tragically, many of these same women rejected—ran screaming from—guys they liked, guys they dug, guys they seriously thought about marrying… when they discovered their guy had some boring, run-of-the-mill kink. But instead of staying with and indulging the perfectly nice foot fetishist—or the totally hot cross-dresser or the freakishly considerate bondage freak—who would so totally owe ‘em now, these woman opted instead to find the dullest, most vanilla guys they could and marry them. Tragic.

I have noticed a number of emails (from women mostly) addressing libido issues. They seem to fall into two distinct categories—women in their 20s whose libido is less than that of their male partner and women in their 30s whose libido is greater than that of their male partners. It’s no secret that (generally speaking) men and women peak sexually at different ages.

My experience is no different. As a male, from about ages 10 to 30 I was ready, willing and able to perform sexually at the drop of a hat. The women in my life? Not so much. Now in my mid-30s, I still enjoy sex but it’s clear the shoe is definitely on the other foot. I know there are physiological and psychological reasons for this, but I can’t help thinking (with smug satisfaction) this is a sort of biological revenge for the blue balls men like me were forced to endure during our sexual prime.

Your thoughts?

Pete

It’s just God’s way of letting us know that straight women in their early 30s and 40s are supposed to sleep with straight boys in their late teens and early 20s and that straight men in their 30s and 40s are supposed to fuck straight girls in their late teens and early 20s.

It’s either that, Pete, or God just likes gay couples—who always in sexual synch (so long as we’re close in age)—way better than He likes straight couples.

The Henry Art Gallery announced today that it is finally getting in the game of giving awards to deserving regional artists! Seattle Art Museum has the Betty Bowen, Portland Art Museum has the Contemporary Northwest Art Awards, Tacoma Art Museum hosts the Neddys—and now, finally, the Henry Art Gallery will have The Brink Award.

It will be awarded every two years to an artist in Washington, Oregon, or British Columbia (the only sensical regional identity, as I’ve written before) and come with $12,500, a solo exhibition, and an acquisition of work.

This is the first big announcement since the arrival of new director Sylvia Wolf, and it’s great news. The first winner will be announced April 17, 2009. Press release on the jump.

Now the only question is: What will the trophy look like? (Charles, this one is for you.)

Continue reading "THE BRINK!" »

Suddenly Bill Clinton is observing the Jewish holidays? From an interview with Larry King that is airing later tonight, here’s Clinton’s response to a question about when he’s going to get out on the trail for Obama:

“When [the Clinton Global Initiative] is over, and after the Jewish holidays, which follow close on it, I intend to go to Florida, to Ohio, to northeast Pennsylvania, and to Nevada at a minimum,” he said. “I may do events in Arkansas depending on what the Democratic Party does down there. And I’ve agreed to do some fundraising for them in California and New York.”

“Are you kind of feeling Jewish that you’re waiting until after the Jewish holidays?” King asked, according to a CNN transcript.

“No. But I think it would be — if we’re trying to win in Florida, it may be that,” Clinton began, before discussing his real Florida target: “You know, they think that because of who I am and where my politic[al] base has traditionally been, they may want me to go sort of hustle up what Lawton Chiles used to call the ‘cracker vote’ there.”

“But Senator Obama also has a big stake in doing well in the Jewish community in Florida, where Hillary did very well and where I did very well. And I just think respecting the holidays is a good thing to do,” he said.

What a mensch!

But isn’t Clinton sounding pretty aloof and cool about Obama lately? He wasn’t a hugely enthusiastic cheerleader on The View recently. And he was so flat on Letterman the other night that Chris Rock, up after Bill, did a whole monologue on the subject. Maybe it’s over-analyzing, or projection, or the creation of a fun “sore loser” narrative that doesn’t quite connect with reality. But people are talking about it.

Here’s how Bill explained it all on The Daily Show last night:

Brendan commenced the discussion a couple weeks ago on Slog, I revisit it this morning on Line Out.

Enjoy, courtesy of Slog tipper Kristina:

Throwing a public party to watch Barack Obama and John McCain go at it this Friday? Shoot me an email with “Debate Watch Party” in the subject line and I’ll post info about all the worthy gatherings on Slog beginning tomorrow.

And it looks like they’re gonna help Obama… but they’re not gonna save him.

Current polling in the 2008 presidential election shows a very tight race between Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain. In part because of the strong support Obama is attracting among younger voters, and as the number of Americans who are reachable only by cell phones rises, interest continues to grow in the question of whether public opinion polls that do not include cell phones are accurately measuring the relative levels of support for the two candidates.

The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press has conducted three major election surveys with both cell phone and landline samples since the conclusion of the primaries. In each of the surveys, there were only small, and not statistically significant, differences between presidential horserace estimates based on the combined interviews and estimates based on the landline surveys only. Yet a virtually identical pattern is seen across all three surveys: In each case, including cell phone interviews resulted in slightly more support for Obama and slightly less for McCain, a consistent difference of two-to-three points in the margin.

Time to double your dosage of Cellexa.

We have a poetry slam and three readings tonight.

At Elliott Bay Book Company, Irvine Welsh reads from his new book. Irvine Welsh, of course, wrote Trainspotting. And he wrote a book called Ecstasy that I really enjoyed. And then he kept writing books. And writing books. These books generally covered the exact same ground of his earlier books.And then he wrote a sequel to Trainspotting. And he kept tilling the same soil. And then he put out a book called If You Like School, You’ll Love Work. And now he’s put out a book called Crime. Irvine Welsh is not that interesting anymore, frankly, but he should get points for still putting out book after book and going on tour to promote them. He’s been to Seattle like four times in the last six years. That’s gumption.

From bad to worse: Mark Richardson reads before Irvine Welsh at Elliott Bay. Richardson wrote a book called Zen and Now: On the Trail of Robert Pirsig and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Man, do I loathe Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The book always struck me as a Lee Hazelwood song without any of the knowing, self-mocking humor that makes Lee Hazelwood songs so appealing. And this book, with its cutesy title and its premise—let’s create the same journey of self-discovery that was documented in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance…only with me as the star this time!—makes for a tremendously unappealing book idea.

But don’t worry: there’s a good reading tonight. Tariq Ali is at Town Hall. Ali is a profoundly intelligent writer on areas of the world that most Americans couldn’t even locate on a map. His newest book, The Duel, is about Pakistan. I’m not as fond of Ali’s novels—something about them seems a little wooden to me—but his nonfiction, like The Duel, is really something. You should really go to this.

Full readings calendar, including the next week or so, here.

The National Enquirer would like you to meet Sarah Palin’s second dude (left)…

…who looks a lot like Sarah Palin’s first dude (right). Gawker walks you through the allegations. Surely this will all be cleared up at Sarah Palin’s first press conference in, oh, October of 2010.

James Adomian, a Los Angeles comedian who made his name doing extemporaneous question-and-answer sessions with audiences at George W. Bush.

He lent his talents to the latest Harold and Kumar adventure:

And here’s an edition of Adomain’s W video blog:

Bush impressions are tired by definition and not all the jokes work, but Adomain has an angry commitment to his schtick redolent of Bill Hicks. On stage, he’s been known to slip into Latin and chew on the heads of doll-babies. He’ll probably tear it up for the Laff Hole crowd.

Also tonight: locals Derek Sheen, Emmett Montgomery and Paul Merrill.

Laff Hole. 10 pm. Go!

“Tables for One” is the title of Peter Schjeldahl’s essay in this week’s New Yorker on the single-minded painter Giorgio Morandi, on the occasion of an exhibition of his paintings at the Metropolitan. Reading the essay is going to be your pleasure, I promise. I wish I could be this clear and poetic and total.

On closer inspection, I discovered how strange the painting was, how the objects seemed to be fighting for each other’s space. One could not determine their size or location.…

The ambiguity of “size or location” is key to Morandi’s indelible modernity. It’s as if he had set out, time and again, to nail down the whatness of his objects but couldn’t get beyond the preliminary matter of their whereness. (He didn’t much value the things in themselves. Photographs show that some were slathered or, in the case of clear glass bottles, filled with pigments—they were dedicated to painting the way animals are raised for food.) Morandi was free of the organizing prejudice of perspective. Go look at a Cezanne after seeing this show [Morandi at the Metropolitan Museum of Art]. It will seem old-fashioned. …

Infinitely refined, Morandi never succumbs to elegance. … That’s because the exigencies of rendering—tiny slippages between eye and hand—constituted, for him, a permanent emergency, requiring incessant adjustment. (Rose petals may jam up like large people competing to pass through a small door.) He did not have a style. He had a signature: “Morandi,” written large, often, to broadcast that a picture had done all it could.

^{Still-Life, 1951}

Morandi, Schjeldahl writes, “has never been a popular artist and never will be” because he “engages the world one solitary viewer at a time.” His monkish devotion to the still-life is another reason why.

I’m always fascinated by artists who spend their entire lives working within incredibly small parameters. In the Northwest, geometric abstractionist Mary Henry is one of these people.

Another one is Denzil Hurley, a Barbados-born painter who spends his days and nights making subtle marks, getting them just right. And for what? How does he decide when they are right? What drives him to keep doing this year after year? Maybe it’s time to ask him.

His paintings are here.

The massacre of Freeway Park continues:

At this moment, the branches of two massive trees are being turned into wood chips, and a flood of sunlight is converting the somber poetry of the park into something that’s irritatingly cheerful.

The backstory is here.

But what you need to know now is that this afternoon at 4 p.m., here on Slog, two Slog commenters will be locked in a liveblogging widget, in the style of a steel cage match, to debate the only question worth debating these days: Barack Obama or John McCain?

Consider it amateur hour, in a good way—a warm up act before the pros go at it in the first presidential debate this Friday.

In the left corner, debating in favor of Barack Obama, will be Will Erdmann, 26, a concierge at the Best Western Executive Inn in downtown Seattle. He goes by “Homo Will” in the comments.

Will writes:

I’m an avid Obama supporter, and have been for the past year and a half. I know his points, as well as his opponent’s, and if had the chance, would slam the hell out of McCain on every point he holds, as weak as it is. My co-workers and boss call me Washington State’s Obama Rep.

And in the right corner, debating in favor of John McCain, will be Larry Kaye, 48, son of an Army infantryman, uncle of a Marine, employee at a non-profit cancer research center in Seattle. He goes by “lark” in the comments.

Larry writes:

I think I could hold my own supporting McCain… Considering 95% of the men and women I call my friends and family are Democrats or left of center, I hold my own pretty well. I served in the Peace Corps (in Cameroon, Africa) twenty years ago. And, I was the only Republican in my group of about 32 vols.

They’ll go at it this afternoon at 4p.m. here on Slog. A duel to the (virtual) death. See you then…

Slog tipper Nick was disturbed by this BBC headline and wanted to nominate it for HOTD…

Designer vagina trend ‘worrying’

But I found the photo used to illustrate the story infinitely more disturbing…

Received via email yesterday afternoon:

In 2004, I tried to get into to Chop Suey on election night in order to be with like-minded folks, but it was too full. This year I’ve never been so hopeful, yet never been so scared shitless of getting my heart broken again by this country. I am already planning on taking November 5th off from work in anticipation of a complete mental breakdown. Any chance you’re planning a big (bigger than Chop Suey) election night party or a post-election celebration/commiseration?

thanks,
Kristin

Kristin, your angst is our command. Behold:

Everyone: Mark you calendars. Kristin: Hope to see you there.

Surrender: Dems give up, allow 25-year ban on offshore drilling to expire.

Investmentigation: FBI probing collapsed investment firms for fraud.

The Jury’s Still Out: No charges yet in Palin email-password-guessing-not-hacking case.

Grand Ol’ Party Crashers: State Dems sue to block Rossi’s deceptive “GOP Party” ballot branding.

Palouse News You Can Use: WSU offers guaranteed admission to state’s top high school grads. Meanwhile, the school’s provost is put on indefinite leave.

Mindless Sport: Former NFL players are literally giving their brains to science.

Bus vs. Circus Elephant: Bus Wins.

Hearts and Minds: What the hell is a Human Terrain Team? Find out here.

Dumping Ground: Tired of Your Punk-Ass 15-Year-Old? Abandon them at a Nebraska hospital or fire station. It’s perfectly legal.

Prolonging Armageddon: Large Hadron Collider shut down for a year.

Buy More Stamps If You Love America Postal service to announce $2.5 billion loss.

We’re Next: As arctic ice melts, polar bears resorting to cannibalism.

Except when she said “lockbox.”

Hey Dan:

Just wondering how that t-shirt thing is going. Watching the M’s game at Bruno’s, that three-run dinger just now kinda sucks. But it’s never a bad night at the ballpark…

To give Mariners’ fans some hope, I saw some talent at the Wisconsin Timber Rattlers game I went to back in August. (Thought the team has just switched to the Brewers.) And being in last place, the very bottom, insures a good pick or two in the draft, although the baseball draft is much less reliable than the NBA or NFL drafts in terms of immediate impact on the team.

But baseball isn’t a game of clocks, or immediate impacts.

Now back to your usual Palin and Economic Meltdown Slog coverage…

On a second, stoned viewing, this YoutTube video reminded me of the last third of this YouTube video.

You see what happens when music and dance is put in the service of the devil? With totally openly gay fags? It’s actually kind of entertaining, huh?

Well, that was a lot of money chasing nothing.

It’s not as if we’re lacking in problems needing solutions—climate change, energy scarcity, almost every meaningful commodity priced at historical highs. A vast pool of money and a growing list of problems—why wasn’t the connection ever made? Why didn’t at least some of this wealth go toward solving these problems?

We could be riding high on American ingenuity. But we’re not.

Let’s say you and I start a company with the goal of replacing petroleum-based jet fuel. We engineer a bug that spits out something pretty close to kerosene. Excellent. Since we’re a company, we immediately patent the invention.

Now what? While we’ve just figured out a key step, our invention by itself cannot replace jet fuel. We need more pieces—the technology to refine our proto-fuel into something we could put into jets, the bioreactor technology to grow our bugs, a factory and its land, a distribution network, sales to airlines, and so on.

That’s a lot of pieces; we only own one right now. If we raised the money and assembled all of these to the point where we could actually sell an useful product, we’d be first. We don’t want to be first.

If we show it can be done, what would stop someone in China or India or somewhere else in the world from stealing all of this technology and competing with us? (Our present global economy isn’t exactly brimming with respect for intellectual property.) Without the cost of buying up patents—the costs of developing the technology—they’d easily outcompete us. By being first, we end up broke.

We’re better off selling our patent. We could sell this patent to someone who wants to turn it into a product—but they’d run into the same problem we would on that path.

The most likely buyer of our patent would be someone who desires our technology to never be turned into a product—someone who already makes jet fuel from petroleum. Patents, in our post-intellectual-property world, are more valuable as a defensive weapon. To a large extent, this is why all the wonderful scientific knowledge and technical ability pouring out of R&D labs fails to translate to something useful for humanity.

(More after the jump or at dearscience.org, including my exciting solution to this problem….)

Continue reading "The Complement Cooperative" »

Perhaps this is why the McCain campaign worked so hard earlier this week to paint The New York Times as out to get their man? Because they knew another shoe was likely to drop in the Times, and they wanted it to be perceived as part of a vendetta, not as a solid piece of investigative journalism? Anyway, here’s the other shoe:

One of the giant mortgage companies at the heart of the credit crisis paid $15,000 a month to a firm owned by Senator John McCain’s campaign manager from the end of 2005 through last month, according to two people with direct knowledge of the arrangement. The disclosure contradicts a statement Sunday night by Mr. McCain that the campaign manager, Rick Davis, had no involvement with the company for the last several years.

Mr. Davis’s firm received the payments from the company, Freddie Mac, until it was taken over by the government this month along with Fannie Mae, the other big mortgage lender whose deteriorating finances helped precipitate the cascading problems on Wall Street, the people said.

They said they did not recall Mr. Davis doing much substantive work for the company in return for the money, other than speak to a political action committee composed of high-ranking employees in October 2006 on the coming midterm congressional elections. They said Mr. Davis’s his firm, Davis & Manafort, was kept on the payroll because of Mr. Davis’s close ties to Mr. McCain.

It’s sterile. Still…

A Castle Rock Middle School student is accused of urinating in a teacher’s drink container…. The 13-year-old was arrested and held in juvenile detention for investigation of placing a harmful substance in a container designed for human consumption.

…gross. When I was in the 10th grade me and a friend stole a teacher’s car. Well, moved it. Never got caught.

Goldy takes down the “amen editorialists” at the Seattle Times.

“Have ‘em.”

Democrats have decided to allow a quarter-century ban on drilling for oil off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts to expire next week, conceding defeat in an month-long battle with the White House and Republicans set off by $4 a gallon gasoline prices this summer.

Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey, D-Wis., told reporters Tuesday that a provision continuing the moratorium will be dropped this year from a stopgap spending bill to keep the government running after Congress recesses for the election.

If this comes to pass, oil speculators win, as do oil companies who have been left blameless in the record-profits-record-prices “paradox.” You want a real price drop? Let the oil bubble pop, and let the speculators stop driving record prices. Instead, if this Democratic quit comes to fruition, then the reduced overhead and convenient access to emergency, conservation-crucial regions will be icing on the cake for these companies’ continued record profits while the bubble naturally pops. All the while, most of America will be too busy making jokes about how gas is cheaper than milk to notice.

If Congress uses CEOs as whipping boys over investment scandals, then jerks them off in the corner, what’s the point? And the Democrats can’t even begin to pass blame on the Republicans for the past four years’ Congressional standstill if they keep meekly responding to Mr. 31 Percent’s veto threats. The only good thing is that Republicans can’t exactly spin this in a political ad. “The Democrats caved to the other side. Do you really want such wimps running the show? Vote McCain.”

…Actually, I’m starting to think the Republicans could run an ad just like that—with a photo of Jesse Jackson in the background Photoshopped next to a burning flag and an aborted fetus—and attract crowds of 200,000 for Sarah Palin in Fayetteville, AR, as a result.

The Beat links to this blog, in which a man found a book called Backstage at the Strips. There was a copy of a 1970 Dennis the Menace cartoon in the book:

And also an apology for the strip that ran in the Cleveland Press the next day:

Yesterday’s DENNIS THE MENACE cartoon offended a number of Press readers. The Press apologizes for the affront caused by the cartoonist. It assures subscribers that such a thing will not happen again.

Here I thought Family Circus was the racistest comic strip in America.

Seattle Police and firefighters responded to an automatic alarm call at the Bellevue Olive Apartments—on Bellevue and Olive, naturally—yesterday evening after a man started a fire in the building.

According to a police report, a man—who fire department sources say only had one leg—barricaded himself in his apartment and started the fire on the building’s fourth floor. The building’s sprinkler system kicked in and put out the fire, and the man jumped from his fourth floor apartment onto a patio four stories below. SPD spokeswoman Renee Witt says the man “was warning other tenants to stay out of the building if they didn’t want to get hurt.”

Several Bellevue Olive residents reportedly told police that the man had not been taking his medication and had told building management that “people had been breaking into his apartment and hacking his computer.”

The man was taken to Harborview but his condition is unknown. The man has not been charged with anything, although the case could be referred to prosecutors once SPD finishes its investigation.

I don’t own a car or a house, or have hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank, so I’ve felt fairly removed from the tanking economy/collapsing bank talk. Until now. Now, the fucked up economy has taken our chocolate.

Via TODAY:

On Friday, TODAY consumer correspondent Janice Lieberman reported that Hershey’s has switched to less expensive ingredients in several of its products. In particular, cocoa butter — the ingredient famous for giving chocolate its creamy, melt-in-your-mouth texture — has been replaced with vegetable oil.

The removal of cocoa butter violates the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s definition of milk chocolate, so subtle changes have appeared on the labels of the Hershey’s products with altered recipes. Products once labeled “milk chocolate” now say “chocolate candy,” “made with chocolate” or “chocolatey.”

Read the full story here.

Granted, I never looked to Hershey’s when I wanted high-quality chocolate, but at least it was real.

(Thanks to Nat for the tip.)

As a nice companion piece to Things Younger Than McCain, there is now Things With Approximately as Many People as Wasilla. A few examples: the number of people in Lehman Brothers’ London office (who, incidentally, “aren’t even sure how much longer they are going to be paid”), the number of people who saw the recent Paris Hilton bomb The Hottie and the Nottie in theaters, and the number of people at the September 15th Obama rally at Cross Orchards Farm, Colorado.

I noticed that Eli took some flak for yesterday’s post about voter registrations being mysteriously “canceled.”

I would just like to say that I, a registered voter, checked on that website as Eli suggested, and was I there? NO! And I was all, “HEY!” Where did my voter registration go? Answer the question, Secretary of State Sam Reed. ANSWER THE QUESTION!!!

Oh, you’re just going to stand there and laugh? Sure. Laugh it up. You’re a real piece of work, Secretary of State Sam Reed. JUST WHAT EXACTLY DO YOU HAVE TO HIDE BEHIND THOSE BEADY LITTLE EYES!? HMMM?

[Note: Please don’t bother to comment and let me know that I could “answer the question” myself with one phone call. That takes all the fun out of yelling. Thank you.]

Perez Hilton has the scoop (thus the floating logos).

More art apropos of our tanking economy:

^{Derek Albeck’s Group Fall (2008), acrylic and ink on paper, 40 by 30 inches (framed)}

^{Derek Albeck’s Delirium (2008), serigraph and acrylic on panel, 37 by 37 inches}

At BLVD. (Gallery site here.)

Well, Jen’s mad because the MacArthur committee didn’t reward the R&D wing of art this year. Their choice for horticulture was virtuous, but also conservative:

One of Wisconsin’s few African-American farmers, Will Allen, a former professional basketball player in the ABA, founded Growing Power in 1993 in Milwaukee to help teach inner-city kids about the origins of their food. It has expanded to include satellite-training sites in Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Massachusetts and Mississippi.

Now Allen’s urban farm sells vegetables, honey, and grass-fed meats to markets in poorer parts of Milwaukee and Chicago, which sometimes have trouble stocking fresh produce. (The disparity between rich-neighborhood access to healthy food and poor-neighborhood access is appalling and depressing.)

Growing Power also sells greens to upscale Chicago restaurants.

Here’s Mr. Allen:

Here’s an aerial shot of the daughter’s garden project in tough-ass Cabrini-Green, planted in a wrecked basketball court:

And here’s the original two-acre farm in the middle of Milwaukee:

Urban farms are quaint and of limited value. If urban density is the goal, the next step is learning how to use the world’s skyscrapers, which add a little more surface area to the earth every day:

EXTRA-REQUIRED:

Once I tried to run/ I tried to run and hide/ But Jesus came and found me and He touched me down inside/ He is like a Mountie/ He always gets his man/ And He’ll zap you any way he can!

Eternal thanks to Matt Hickey.

I’d also like to point out that the name of this band is “Sonseed,” which is clearly nothing more than a euphemism for “Jesus Jizz.” Really, Christians? And I’m the morally bankrupt pervert? Eew.

Ain’t It Cool News points to this article in Variety. The director of Night Watch and Wanted is filming a re-imagination of Moby Dick.

The writers revere Melville’s original text, but their graphic novel-style version will change the structure. Gone is the first-person narration by the young seaman Ishmael…This change will allow them to depict the whale’s decimation of other ships prior to its encounter with Ahab’s Pequod, and Ahab will be depicted more as a charismatic leader than a brooding obsessive…”Our vision isn’t your grandfather’s ‘Moby Dick,’ ” Cooper said. “This is an opportunity to…tell what at its core is an action-adventure revenge story.”

At first blush, I think this has to be a joke, but then I remember the Demi Moore version of The Scarlet Letter, with its happy ending, and I bet this will actually happen.

…on Xbox Live.

In one of the nation’s largest unofficial election polls, Senator Barack Obama leads the vote by a 12 percent margin, while 26 percent voted “undecided” or “other.”

Nearly 100,000 LIVE Americans turned out to cast their “votes” in a poll over Xbox LIVE, making it larger than the combined samples from individual Gallup, NBC, and CNN polls.

Results from the first-ever poll over Xbox LIVE indicate the following:

Obama \ Biden: 43%

McCain \ Palin: 31%

Undecided: 13%

Other: 13%

I’m so embarrassed. I forgot to vote.

Worth. Your. Time.

“This is the single most amazingly choreographed video of a Christan synth-pop boogie down bunch on YouTube I’ve ever seen,” says Slog tipper Kid Icarus. “Try not to lose it around the 1:54 mark.”

I tried, I failed.

Lest I seem to be all grouse and no love for today’s MacArthur winners, let me heap some heavy affection on New Yorker music writer Alex Ross, who stands up for all the right things in art music (and again) and whose terrific 2007 book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century has its own free audio guide here, on which any music lover of any kind and at any level can lose many, many, many hours.

(Not only all this, but Ross has been incredibly generous: A few years ago he loaded up an iPod for the charity auction Strangercrombie. Somebody is walking around here with a certifiably genius playlist.)

^{Illustration by Kyle T. Webster}

Better late than never…

House GOP rises up against Cheney

No, wait: I meant, “Fuck those stupid motherfucking fuckers. FUCK THEM.”

I can’t read about our tanking economy without this Monty Python skit coming to mind…

First, there’s this in the PI:

M’s in a tight race for the bottom

At last, the Mariners are finally playing some meaningful games in September.

They almost blew it by winning seven of nine in August but rallied with a 12-game losing streak that puts them in a coldly contested battle with the Washington Nationals for the worst record in baseball.

And here’s the t-shirt…

…which you can order here.

But delivery takes a week and by then the season will be over. So I called the Crypt to see if they had any “Bottom” t-shirts in stock. “No, we don’t,” said Ellie, the Crypt’s assistant manager. “It seems that only ‘Manwhore’ and ‘Piglet’ are in high demand these days.” Those t-shirts wouldn’t be appropriate for the ballpark, which is a “family setting.” But if you want to go to the game in a “Bottom” t-shirt—and who doesn’t?—you can design your own and get it this afternoon at B-Bam. Here’s mine…

See you at the ballpark!

Mark Krikorian, over at the right-wing National Review’s the Corner blog, places the blame for this Wall Street crisis squarely where it belongs:

I have no way of judging whether the Wall Street bailout is a necessary evil or an impending disaster. But we’re in this mess, ultimately, because our political elites thought it was good social policy to encourage banks to give mortgages to uncreditworthy people, resulting in what Sailer months ago called the “Diversity Recession” (if this doesn’t work, make that the Diversity Depression). In other words, if poor people in general, or blacks or Hispanics in particular, were less likely to be approved for a mortgage, the only possible reason was racism or classism or whatever. Thus “creditworthiness” was an illegitimate, dead-white-male concept, like middleclassness. Because, after all, isn’t everyone entitled to credit? Therefore, I propose any bailout bill start with these words: “It is the sense of Congress that credit is not a civil right.”

Of course! This damnable billions-dollar bailout is obviously caused by poor people and especially minorities. Holy fucking shit.

I’m a 20 year old bisexual female. I like having my sexual partners tie me up and beat me. However, I have a physical coming up in a couple of months. I’m worried that the bruises may bring up questions with my doctor, and she’ll believe I’m being abused, despite it being consensual. Should I own up to my doctor and tell her I’m engaging in consensual, safe, BDSM practices, or should I hold off on getting beat for a few weeks before my physical and not bring up the topic?

Very Kinky Girl

I guess it comes down to what you dread more, VKG: going without those beatings for a couple of weeks or coming out to your doctor about your kinks.

You might also want to consider finding a kink-friendly doctor. The National Coalition for Sexual Freedom maintains a list of “kink-aware professionals,” including doctors, psychologists, lawyers, counselors, etc.

And now, winner of the Best Job in the World^TM category: The 1950’s Italian Police Motorcycle Drill Team…

This is an actual, real headline from the news today:

CEO murdered by mob of sacked Indian workers

Here are the first two paragraphs:

Corporate India is in shock after a mob of sacked workers bludgeoned to death the chief executive who had dismissed them from a factory in a suburb of Delhi.

Lalit Kishore Choudhary, 47, the head of the Indian operations of Graziano Transmissioni, an Italian-headquartered manufacturer of car parts, died of severe head wounds on Monday afternoon after being attacked by scores of laid-off employees, police said.

Things are getting bad.

This year’s MacArthur Genius from the art world is New Yorker Tara Donovan, someone whose work I’ve never been able to get too thrilled about. (Greg Kucera Gallery showed some of it last year.)

It’s not that I don’t see how intriguing it can be. Here’s a 2000 ink drawing that leads the way stylistically into one of her signature assemblages made of everyday materials (this one is Scotch tape, from 2002).

It’s just that her art strikes me as a deeply conservative project in some ways—it takes messy excess (hundreds of rolls of printer paper or thousands of buttons, for instance) and tidies it and elevates it into the world of pretty abstractions and references to natural forms like coral reefs. The implications are occasionally tense—as in a perfect 2001 stack of shattered tempered glass held together only by friction and gravity—but as often the installations are little more than blandly reassuring. I guess their restraint feels to me like a light form of denial or very refined escapism. It leaves me wanting.

This is just to say that I find Donovan’s work worthy of attention but not exactly in the R&D department of the art world, as a winner of $500,000 ought to be. I’m hoping for more next time.

…here.

…by our child porn investigations, raids on our compounds, and our leader’s incriminating statement to the Associated Press.

Six minors have been temporarily placed in state custody as part of a child porn investigation after a raid on a ministry run by a man who says “consent is puberty” when it comes to sex, officials said Sunday.

The children will be in the custody of the Arkansas Department of Human Services as investigators interview them, state police spokesman Bill Sadler said in a statement. Sadler didn’t say how long the interviews would last, but did say that courts would decide the children’s status in the event of any “long-term separation” from the property of the Tony Alamo Christian Ministries in rural Fouke….

Alamo claimed in a telephone interview with The Associated Press on Saturday that the investigation was part of a federal push to legalize same-sex marriage while outlawing polygamy. He also said for girls having sex, “consent is puberty.”

Want to watch the presidential debate? Don’t want to do it alone? Slog is here to help!

Join us, won’t you?

We got a copy of Leatherheads in the mail a week ago, presumably in anticipation of the movie’s release on DVD today. As is now public knowledge (Thanks, Lindy!), I am a huge Clooney whore, but I missed the movie when it was in theaters for three days last year, so I took the DVD home and watched it.

I don’t understand exactly how something with so many great ideas behind it can be so very dull. I love screwball comedies. I love con artist movies. I loved George Clooney’s other two directorial efforts. I tend to love movies set in Prohibition. But Leatherheads just kind of happened to me and then faded from my memory almost immediately.

Ostensibly the story of an aging football player (Clooney) recruiting a hot young football player (John Krasinski, who did not once look at the camera and raise his eyebrows knowingly—are you too good for us now that you’re in a big Hollywood movie, Krasinski? Is that it?) even as he falls in love with a plucky female reporter (Renée Zellweger, who made me miss Jennifer Jason Leigh in the Hudsucker Proxy so much that I hurt inside.) It’s also about the debut of rules in football.

There are some really funny moments, and some snappy dialogue here and there, but Leatherheads just kind of sits there for way too long. There aren’t nearly enough football scenes—and I say this as someone who hates football, but found the few game sequences in Leatherheads a lot of fun. If Clooney had taken the time to have writers go back over the script and massage some humor into more of the movie, it would’ve been a great farce. As it is, though, there are lots of tone problems: a scene involving a police raid on an illegal bar turns into a bad Keystone Cops homage, for instance, and a couple of the obligatory character-building scenes drag on forever with no humor or invention. It’s the kind of movie you watch when nothing at all is interesting, or you’re stuck on the plane with a bunch of bad options. For serious Clooney whores only.

In addition to losing the media, today the McCain campaign also loses conservative columnist George Will:

Under the pressure of the financial crisis, one presidential candidate is behaving like a flustered rookie playing in a league too high. It is not Barack Obama.

Will’s theme: that McCain’s temperament—his unique combination of impulsiveness, score-settling, moralism, self-satisfaction, and a short fuse—make him a risky bet. The conclusion:

It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?

I believe that’s what certain liberals call a slap-down.

A minute after I posted something to Slog calling on the media to stop covering the McCain Campaign, John Aravosis made the exact same point at Americablog.

Why is the media putting up with this? Just pull your staff from the bus (well, van) and plane. You people serve no more purpose than FOX News. You’re there to parrot what Palin and McCain want you to parrot. Stop it. CNN and CBS took a good first step today, by pulling their reporters from a phony Palin photo opp. Now it’s time to go for the Full Monty. Pull your reporters from coverage of the McCain campaign until Palin and McCain start acting like big boys and girls, like potential future leaders of the free world.

Great/gay minds, etc.

Why should the bailout plan be structured as a purchase of bad assets? I’m no expert, but it seems that features of this plan necessarily include:

(a) a premium price (why would the government need to step in to pay fair market value? Indeed, Bernanke said today the bad-asset buy would be at “hold-to-maturity” prices—if I understand this correctly, this would be far in excess of fair market value, because it wouldn’t discount for risk—in many cases this would surely be greater than the troubled firms paid for these loan pools in the first place);

(b) the need for a massive loan workout operation which inevitably will involve outsourcing much of the work to the very firms who helped create the problem, with massive fees for doing so;

(c) putting the government in the position of foreclosing on or otherwise playing hardball with its distressed homeowner-citizens; and

(d) no effect on the internal workings or policies of the firms being bailed out.

What such a “plan” amounts to is the House covering the markers of the biggest whales among its high rollers. “Sorry for the inconvenience Sir. Let me cover that for you. Now, may I interest you in the Royal Suite tonight? I’m sure your luck will change tomorrow.”

Here’s what should happen instead: Allot $700 billion for the Treasury to purchase stock in affected securities firms. Any firm wanting the taxpayers’ cash must bid for it on a competitive basis. The Treasury may select bids based on a variety of factors affecting the public interest. These may include price, rights and preferences of the shares being purchased, participation of the Treasury on the Board of Directors, internal reforms involving executive compensation and investment decision-making, and the adoption of policies to relieve mortgage borrowers, such as variable interest-rate freezes and extended forbearance from foreclosure.

In contrast to the Paulson Bad Asset Buy, a Competitive Purchase of Equity would keep the firms’ feet to the fire in managing these bad assets, would avoid a costly and disruptive new government loan workout program, would assure the public a participation in the eventual upside, and would enable progress on the related public purposes of executive compensation reform and relief for distressed borrowers. Wouldn’t that be fairer for all Americans?

This Stranger reader may not be a finance expert, but he is a business lawyer. (Hi, Bob!) Mr. Golob, what do you think?

Poor Freeway Park, the best park in this city (a park as a work of urban theory), is being destroyed at this very moment. See for yourself:

The wonderful/magical/mysterious bushes are now just stumps, and an ugly chain-link fence has been mercilessly bolted to the concrete wall. It’s so ugly, so cruel to the eyes and imagination. The spell of this part of the park has been broken. The traffic and surrounding towers are exposed and raw. The whole situation is oppressive.

Read and weep:

Bill Clinton was on Letterman last night, and he went on and on about what a great candidate Hillary was, and how many votes she got, and what she would’ve done about the economic crisis, blah blah blah. Then Chris Rock came on and let Bill Clinton have it. It’s required viewing…

The media revolts against the McCain campaign’s attempts to restrict access to a Palin photo-op, says the NYT. After attempting to keep all reporters out of a photo-op between Palin and Afghan President Hamid Karzai, the McCain camp relents and allows a single reporter to observe the photo-op.

Hm.

Maybe it’s time for the media to pull all reporters—print and television, photographers and videographers—off the McCain campaign. Entirely. Press coverage of a campaign is supposed to be a two-way street. The candidate wants to get his mug on television, he wants his rallies and speeches broadcast and written up, he wants to use the media to reach the voters. In exchange for allowing themselves to be used, the candidate is supposed to make himself available to reporters and anchors, answer questions, hold press conferences. The McCain campaign isn’t holding up its end of the deal. It’s using the media to reach voters without making Palin and, increasingly, McCain available for questioning.

Why should the media play along? The media should pull reporters off the McCain campaign and refuse to cover rallies or speeches until McCain and Palin start holding press conferences. Period. You want to reach our viewers and readers? Start answering our questions. Don’t want to answer our questions? We’ll ignore you and your campaign.

A bunch of readings tonight.

Up at Third Place Books, Michael Greenberg reads from Hurry Down Sunshine, which is a book about raising a child with serious manic depressive disorder. It’s a pretty thoughtful book and would definitely be worth your time, particularly if you have anyone in your family with mental problems.

At Town Hall, Frank Wilczek reads from The Lightness of Being, which is about physics and reality. It looks not too What the [BLEEP] Do We Know?, which is to say, there looks to be actual physics in the book. Hopefully, this means the book is not so much with the touchy-feelies.

Up at Wide World Books & Maps in Wallingford, Micha Berman reads from Permanent Passenger: My Life on a Cruise Ship. Berman was “Assistant Cruise Director on one of the largest cruise ships in the world, Carnival Cruise Line’s M.S. Ecstasy.” If you’re as fascinated by the cruise ship lifestyle as I am, you’ll probably find this interesting.

Ashley Wearly, my intern, very much liked Padma Viswanathan’s new book, The Toss of a Lemon. Viswanathan is reading in Bellevue tonight. The book is about a family in India in the late 1800’s, spanning a few generations in the course of the book.

And Elliott Bay Book Company hosts Daphne Beal, the author of In the Land of No Right Angles. Commenter Aislinn reviewed that book for us just a couple weeks ago. She hated it, with some very good reasons why. Are you going to let Aislinn down by going to this reading? I don’t think so.

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

Brought to you Naomi Wolf via Huffington Post:

What’s the plan? It is this. McCain doesn’t matter. Reputable dermatologists are discussing the fact that in simply actuarial terms, John McCain has a virulent and life-threatening form of skin cancer. It is the elephant in the room, but we must discuss the health of the candidates: doctors put survival rates for someone his age at two to four years. I believe the Rove-Cheney cabal is using Sarah Palin as a stalking horse, an Evita figure, to put a popular, populist face on the coming police state and be the talk show hostess for the end of elections as we know them. If McCain-Palin get in, this will be the last true American election. She will be working for Halliburton, KBR, Rove and Cheney into the foreseeable future…

Go here for the rest of The Battle Plan II: Sarah “Evita” Palin, the Muse of the Coming Police State, and may God have mercy on our souls.

Congress for New Urbanism has a list up for of ten urban freeways that should be torn down and replaced with “boulevards and other cost-saving urban alternatives.” Topping the list? Seattle’s own Alaska Way Viaduct.

Built in 1953, as State Route 99, the Alaskan Way Viaduct is a north-south route alongside Seattle’s Elliot Bay and carries approximately 105,000 vehicles per day. Proposals released by the Washington State Department of Transportation for an expanded elevated highway or a tunnel during the downtown segment—each with price tags of $4 billion or more—met with fierce opposition. On a March 13, 2007, Seattleites voted both of these options down in a local referendum—welcoming in a surface and transit option.

This progress stems in large part from the leadership of the City Council and the People’s Waterfront Coalition, led by Cary Moon, who envisioned an open waterfront that would begin to restore the shoreline and support a vibrant urban place. Opening up 335 acres of public land on Seattle”s waterfront could give way to new parks, beaches, and development—and save the city years of construction delays and billions of dollars. “If you try to build your way out of congestion,” said Moon, “you’ll ruin your city or go broke trying.”

Says The Bellows…

The additional automobile connectivity gained by extending a freeway into a dense urban area is small, and absolutely not worth the lost land value. Neither is it a reasonable use of urban land to hold freeway miles designed to carry through traffic. If other institutions want to pay a central city to bury a freeway so that through traffic can have an uninterrupted straight-line journey, then fine, but central cities shouldn’t volunteer to undermine the value of their greatest asset—dense, gridded neighborhoods near job and residential centers.

With money on the line Bush turns to a phrase that, for most readers of this blog, is more likely to recall anti-war street protests than economic urgency.

And, somewhat related: over at HuffPo, Arianna is having “Shock and Awe” deja vu.

(Thanks to Slog tipper FunShaped)

I’m searching for a particular Monty Python skit and I’ve gone through every clip I can find on YouTube without luck. Does anyone else remember a Python skit about people living in an apartment tower that was an illusion created by a magician? So long as they believed, the building was fine. If they doubted the existence of the building, it might collapse.

I remembering watching that skit on television in my mother’s bedroom about, oh, 30 years ago. But I can’t find it anywhere. Am I crazy? Were false memories of non-existent Monty Python skits implanted in my mind by an unethical psychiatrist? Or is it out there somewhere?

And does anyone have a link to it?

I’m listening to a report on KUOW right now about 1-1000, the Death With Dignity Initiative. Two widows are discussing the deaths of their husbands. One widow plans to vote for I-1000, the other plans to vote against it.

The woman voting for the initiative—whose husband died of brain cancer—wants terminally ill people to have a choice at the end of their lives, a choice to end their suffering and hasten an inevitable, rapidly approaching death. The woman voting against the initiative wants… well, she wants to have a good death, a peaceful death, like the one her husband, um, enjoyed. “I would like to be enveloped in the love of a good caregiver I would get,” she says.

That’s nice. We should all be so lucky to enjoy Hallmark deaths, enveloped in the love of good caregivers and under the care of “pain management” professionals. But not everyone is going to be so lucky. Some of us will have to endure deaths that are gruesome and protracted and excruciating, deaths involving pain that cannot be managed, deaths that our loving caregivers can only stand helplessly by and witness.

“You don’t know how you’re going to feel at the end of your life,” the widow planning to vote for I-1000 says. “I want to have the choices available to me.”

Exactly. If I-1000 is approved by Washington state voters, the widow opposed to the initiative will not be compelled to end her life with the assistance of a physician. She can choose pain meds and the love of caregivers and die a “natural” death. (What’s so “natural” about pain management anyway?) But if I-1000 is rejected, the widow that plans to vote in favor of it will not have the same choice. She will not be able to choose to end her life, and end her suffering, if the pain becomes to much for her to bear.

And that’s what the debate about I-1000 is really all about. Choice. Your body, your death, your choice. The passage of I-1000 doesn’t impose anything on terminally ill people who reject physician-assisted suicide for religious reasons. But the rejection of I-1000 imposes the values of others on terminally ill people that would like to make that choice for themselves.

And, I’m sorry, but there’s nothing about physician-assisted suicide—or, as it should be called, end-of-life pain management—that precludes the presence of loving caregivers. You can be surrounded by love and have access to the best medical care available and still conclude—reasonably and rationally—that you would rather not spend the last few moments of your life in blinding pain or zonked out of your mind on just enough morphine to (hopefully) deaden your pain but not enough to deaden you.

This post from yesterday brought the following clarification from King County Elections:

Hi Eli,

I wanted to provide some clarification in response to your recent posting.

Election officials don’t remove voters’ registrations simply because they haven’t voted. Voters are kept on “active” status until we hear from them or from another county that the voter has re-registered somewhere else, or if we receive a piece of returned mail from their address. If we hear a voter has registered in another county, then we cancel them. If we receive undeliverable mail from a voter, then we put them on “inactive” status. A voter can become active again by calling our office.

The post office will forward ballots as long as voters have a current forwarding order in place, but if we receive any piece of correspondence back at our office as undeliverable, the voter is placed on inactive status. If a voter is inactive, they are given a two- to four-year window in which they can give us their correct information with a simple phone call before the voter’s registration is cancelled. More information on cancelling a registration can be found here.

If a voter’s signature on their absentee ballot packet doesn’t match their signature on file, they will not be removed from the voter rolls. King County Elections will contact the voter and the voter will have until the night before certification (two to three weeks following election day) to resolve their signature issue.

If any of your readers have questions about their voting status, please have them call King County Elections at 206-296-VOTE (8683).

Thanks, Eli.

Megan Coppersmith
King County Elections

Thanks, Megan. And sorry for any confusion, Sloggers. I’ve updated the previous post with a link to this clarification.

Yesterday I noted John McCain’s 13 cars. Today the Obama campaign notes them as well:

Via Ben Smith.

Good news this morning for Barack Obama.

That tracking poll bump I mentioned last week now seems to be translating into leads in key states like Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and—and this is potentially big—Florida. Something about the combination of bad economic times and continuing attacks on John McCain is clearly helping the Obama campaign.

Yes, Obama’s Minnesota and Florida leads are within the margin or error, but check out an electoral college map and you can see why it’s such a big deal if Obama can carry all of the above-mentioned states. Here are the poll numbers:

COLORADO: Obama 49 – McCain 45

MICHIGAN: Obama 48 - McCain 44

MINNESOTA: Obama 47 - McCain 45

WISCONSIN: Obama 49 - McCain 42

FLORIDA: Obama 47 - McCain 45

(Clickable here and here. And remember: Pollzac.)

A political candidate out knocking on doors encounters a pit bull running loose…

“I didn’t have a chance to be scared because it was more of a surprise,” he said. “The dog just came out of nowhere, lunging down there and it was almost airborne moving at me and that quick it latched around the pants and kind of ripped around the whole pants.”

Says the pit bull owner…

The owner of the dog, who was not identified, said the dog didn’t attack Dahlberg, but admitted the dog ripped the pants of the former Duluth city councilor.

Thanks to Slog tipper Starfire.

Andrew Sullivan pulls them all into a single post. First up…

She has lied about the Bridge To Nowhere. She ran for office favoring it, wore a sweatshirt defending it, and only gave it up when the federal congress, Senator McCain in particular, went ballistic. She kept the money anyway and favors funding Don Young’s Way, at twice the cost of the original bridge.

The eleven others are here.

The Saga Continues: Palin kinda sorta agrees to participate in Troopergate investigation.

Hopefully It’ll Give Us Superpowers Instead of Cancer: EPA opts not to clean up water in 35 states contaminated by rocket fuel ingredient.

Salt Is the New Oil: Salt shortage, cost increases could make for an icier winter.

Sonic Boon: City budget director wants to put Sonics settlement towards Key Arena debt.

Magnolia’s Gonna Be Pissed: City pushes forward with plan for homeless housing in Fort Lawton.

Squirrels Are Next: Alaskan biologists declare war on rat population.

Death From Above: Scottish farmers claim recently reintroduced eagles are stealing, killing hundreds of lambs.

Last week, the Seattle Times reported that a group of veterenarians were refusing to volunteer at King County animal shelters, “citing a lack of accountability and a reluctance from shelter staff to fix a broken system.” In the story, Times reporter Sonia Krishnan quoted vet Brad Crauer, medical director of the Redmond Animal Hospital, who said that he had stopped offering his services at the Kent and Bellevue animal shelters because “I did not want to act as enablers to the proven failed procedures.”

Crauer, the only named source to denounce King County’s shelter practices (the only other quoted anti-county sources are surveys filled out by anonymous veterinarians ), claims in the story that King County did nothing to improve problems at the shelters; isolated animals; and did nothing to help sick animals.

Last week, County Executive Ron Sims responded to the Times story—via Twitter, which he used recently to announce that King County’s budget deficit had increased from $85 million to $90 million. Sims’s understated post read simply, “Dear Seattle Times and KOMO - Here is a blog story regarding King County’s Animal Control that is worth reading.” A link went to a blog post at King County Animal Shelter Creatures, titled, “Pain and muscle relaxants prescribed by the vet for himself using name of his dead dog.”

The “vet,” in this case, would be Crauer—who, the post goes on to contend, also wrongly accused King County of falsifying euthanasia numbers and faking discrepancies in the logs documenting use of controlled drugs at the shelter, among other misdeeds. The clear implication: Why should the Times (and KOMO, which also reported on the vets’ defection) listen to Dr. Crauer, when he had falsified records and prescribed himself controlled substances under his dead dog’s name?

While I’m not sure if Sims’s criticisms are on point (Crauer certainly seems like a less than reliable source; on the other hand, do his alleged drug problems and supposed false cremation documents negate other vets’ claims that there were real problems at King County shelters?), his method (Twitter) and tone (combative) are noteworthy. And they certainly got the attention of the King County Council, which is planning to release a response later this week (a lengthy request for information about the shelters’ 2008 work, sent last Friday, has reportedly been in the works for some time) to Sims’s Twitter attack on Crauer. I’ll post their response as soon as I get it.

This time courtesy of Steven Spielberg and his wife Kate Capshaw.

Their donation is the latest high-profile contribution to the campaign, as gay marriage advocates seek to narrow a gap in fund-raising. Brad Pitt donated $100,000 to the No on 8 campaign last week, in what was seen as a wakeup call to entertainment industry figures to pony up more money for the fight….

Spielberg and Capshaw said in a statement, “By writing discrimination into our state constitution, Proposition 8 seeks to eliminate the right of each and every citizen in our state to marry regardless of sexual orientation. Such discrimination has NO place in California’s constitution, or any other.”

Take that, Douglas Kmiec. More here. The latest “No on Prop 8” commercial…

Donate here. I gave today. Week after next I’m going to give Savage Love readers an opportunity—well, it’ll actually more like an order—to give too.

The pit bull pictured in the terrible photo below was locked in a car outside The Stranger’s offices, and therefore unable to chew off anybody’s face. Instead, it cleverly decided to sit on the car’s horn for about five minutes straight, driving the whole block temporarily insane.

Well played, sir.

When I walked out to get a picture, he jumped into the back seat and has remained there so far.

How do I know it’s a he? He has great big balls (not pictured), for the making of more pit bulls.

UPDATE: Window was cracked. No evidence whatsoever that this dog owner is irresponsible, other than the dog’s continued possession of nutsack.

Before the Seattle Police Officers Guild can renegotiate its contract with the city in 2010, the City Council and Office of Professional Accountability Review Board (OPARB) will hold a public hearing on police accountability to allow the public to voice concerns about the department.

Earlier today, council passed a bill which will require OPARB and the council to hold public hearings 90 days before the city and the guild begin contract negotiations. The hearings won’t necessarily have a direct effect on future contracts, but it’ll certainly give any victims of misconduct a very public forum to air their grievances before the city signs off on another fat pay raise.

I’ve accidentally dignified—or denigrated—that kid is alleged to have broken into Sarah Palin’s email account. Hacker? Hardly, says our info systems administrator…

Compromising Palin’s Yahoo email account was just a matter of knowing the email address, and being able to guess that “Wasilla high” was what she’d entered as the place she’d met her husband, both of which were in the public record. Yahoo deserves some scorn on this point. This was less a hack than the result of pushing on a door and watching it swing open.

More here.

News or product placement?

SOUTH BEND – A 20-year-old man told police he was stabbed by his younger brother Sunday night after a fight broke out over a Hot Pocket.

Yes, Hot Pockets™. So good, you’ll stab your brother.

This is what I imagine this weekend was like in Washington:

I have a suggestion: Contact your representative, and tell them you support Dodd’s plan over the Paulson slush-fund.

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd offered an alternative today to the Bush administration’s financial rescue plan aimed at giving the U.S. Treasury an equity stake when it helps companies burdened by debt.

Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, is circulating a draft of his bill as Congress seeks to deal with a financial crisis that has been called the U.S.’s worst since the Great Depression.

The Bush administration is proposing a $700 billion plan to buy devalued assets from investment firms to keep the financial system from coming to a halt. Democrats have pledged to act quickly on the measure, even as they seek to create an oversight structure, limit the compensation of executives at the companies benefiting from the rescue and provide mortgage relief for struggling borrowers.

It’s a modest, but essential, set of things to ask for if we’re going to open our wallets.

For Seattle-area people, the numbers are:
Patty Murray: (202) 224-2621
Maria Cantwell: (202) 224-3441
Jim McDermott: 206-553-7170 or 202-225-3106
Dave Reichert: 206-275-3438 or 202-225-7761

Over in the reader comments on our 2008 Back to School Guide (or Your Indispensable Guide to the Things No One Else Will Tell You by the Only Newspaper in Seattle That Isn’t Ridiculous and Irrelevant™), we find this remark from the_smith:

I find the bar I work in taken over by college age kids who are impatient and messy and don’t tip. Stranger, you gave great advice about how to order a drink like an adult but that needs an etiquette follow-up. Please mention the buck-a-drink standard and tipping at least 15%, esp. late. I can put up with any kind of self-obsessed faux-intelligencia as long as I am being paid to do so. This will make my world and in turn your world a much better place. Thanks and keep up the great writing.

the_smith, who is entirely correct about this glaring omission, refers to the following section of the Everything You Need to Know About Life section of The Guide to End All Guides:

How to Drink Like an Adult

Do not order a rum-and-anything. Do not order a Diet-and-anything. Do not drink anything that is pink or anything that is blended. Do not drink malt liquor or schnapps of any variety. Do not drink anything containing flecks of gold or taurine. Do not order any drink that has more than three components; two components are preferable. Do not partake in any drinking that involves dropping one beverage into another, nor in any drinking that involves a funnel…. All of these fall into two basic rules which also apply to life as a whole: Don’t get too complicated about it and don’t be an asshole.

Tipping clearly falls under the “don’t be an asshole” rule, but it absolutely should’ve been said outright. Youth of today: Tip, and tip well. Otherwise, drink at home.

The writer of the guide is being disciplined.

The beautiful drawings for the 2008 Back to School Guide are by Jessixa Bagley.

Scholastic is not going to allow its Bratz books, which are based on the sexy, sexy children’s toys, to be sold at book fairs for children anymore. Apparently, consumer groups complained about the books, which had titles like Catwalk Cuties, Dancin’ Divas, and Pukin’ to Pretty*, and Scholastic finally pulled the plug. I had forgotten all about Scholastic’s involvement in the schools: I really miss book fairs and book orders. Sometimes those were the highlights of my year.

Continue reading "The Endz of an Era" »

We’re not supposed to criticize Obama for throwing traditional Democratic constituents under the bus because the alternative is one hundred billion times worse. But come on … any Buse-outing, Brad Pitt-praising, homo agenda-supporting liberal ought to be concerned that the Democratic presidential candidate is about to kick off a “Faith, Freedom and Values” tour featuring none other than Catholic legal scholar Douglas Kmiec, who recently wrote an op/ed, titled “Should California amend its Constitution? Say ‘no’ to the Brave New World” for the San Francisco Chronicle supporting Prop. 8—the measure that would ban gay marriage in California:

Maybe it is enough to say, as many do in conversation, that it merely re-secures a millennia of tradition and common sense. The initiative will restore to the people what was wrongfully taken from them: the right of self-governance and respect for the marital institution. […]

Beyond correcting the court’s disregard of the separation of powers, insisting upon preserving the link between marriage and procreation: 1) promotes the orderly continuation of the species; 2) avoids the uncertainties of single-gender effects on children (most parents readily recognize the distinctive contributions of male and female in child rearing); and 3) takes respectful account of the difficulties of accommodating religious freedom that arise subsequent to the legal acceptance of same-sex marriage.

He goes on and on in that vein, regurgitating disproven concerns about gay marriage as “a contributing cause to the decline of families with natural children,” repeating the tired old “every child needs a mother and a father” canard, and likening gay couple’s claim that marriage is a right to “a claimed universal right to access to genetically engineered children.”

So, Dan, if you’re still wondering why Obama hasn’t come out against Proposition 8… You might want to take a look at his surrogates.

Move over desperate Nigerians, here’s how it’s really done:

Dear American:

I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.

I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.

I am working with Mr. Phil Gram, lobbyist for UBS, who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a Senator, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. This transactin is 100% safe.

This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.

Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction. After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds.

Yours Faithfully Minister of Treasury Paulson

Remember that $2,300 contribution McCain was going to return to the founder of Manhunt? Looks like he’s hanging on to the big gay cash.

Dear Paul Constant,

How can you not love this?

Sincerely,

Your Conscience.

…and his Destroyer series of books, which has been published on a semi-regular basis for thirty years, has been cancelled.

right now, everything with the destroyer is basically on hold and i think remo and chiun, series-wise, are going on vacation for a while. tor hasn’t offered us a contract and, frankly, if they did, i don’t think i’d entertain it. they were just not efficient at getting the books out on time and the operative word with a book series is “series.”

Every once in a while, I’ll read a Destroyer novel for the hell of it. The novels, which were the basis for the horrible Remo Williams movie, are about a kung-fu assassin and his master, Chiun. The books were often sci-fi and fantasy tinged, and my favorite part of the books is a conceit with the writing. The series was written by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir, and one author would begin a book, get Remo and Chiun in a bind, and then hand it off to the other author, who would have to finish the book. It made for good action writing, I think, to have a fresh author conclude the adventure.

Things went downhill when Sapir died in the late eighties, and Murphy took over the writing. The characters became highly conservative-minded, and very few Destroyer books have been written since then that did not include a tribute to Ronald Reagan. But if you like cheap and breezy thrillers that can be read in an hour or two, you should pick up a 70’s or early 80’s Destroyer novel if you come across one in a used bookstore. At its prime, they were wonderful fun. Macmillan recently published a The Best of the Destroyer book that includes three of the best novels of the entire run. It’s a pretty great read to take on vacation and demolish in a half day’s sitting.

After a developer cut down number of trees on a greenbelt North Seattle last week, Save The Trees—a group of tree-loving neighborhood activists in North Seattle—held a press conference to scream at the city about a loophole that, they say, is allowing developers to deforest the city.

The city apparently heard Save The Trees’ complaints. In a letter sent to a STT member last week, the Department of Planning and Development says it will seek to fine the developer.

Thank you for notifying the Department of Planning and Development (DPD) of the tree cutting issues at 12301 5th Avenue NE. Although the applicant had a permit application under review for this site, a permit has not been issued. Current regulations prohibit the removal of trees over 6-inches in diameter on undeveloped lots unless a building permit has been issued allowing removal of specific trees.

In coordination with City Arborists, DPD issued a Stop-Work Order on Monday. Unfortunately, it appears many of the trees may have been removed over the weekend. Our enforcement staff will be following up on this issue to prevent this from occurring on the applicant’s adjacent parcels to the north. In addition to the Stop-Work Order, we will be seeking a civil penalty in an amount equal to the appraised value of the trees removed and may require a restoration plan as a result of this action.

If you happen to notice an illegal action such as this in the future, please call our complaint line at 615-0808. DPD enforcement staff are able to respond to these issues expeditiously when notified. Thank you for your continued interest in tree regulations and alerting us of this issue.

Bryan Stevens
Customer Service Manager &
Seattle’s Industrial Permit Liaison
City of Seattle
Department of Planning and Development

While the city appears to suddenly have wood for Seattle’s tree canopy, it remains to be seen whether DPD will step in to assist other tree-loving splinter groups around Seattle.

…is a fag. That doesn’t sit well with the homos, of course, seeing as McCain is pretty damn anti-gay. (Pathetic LCR endorsement notwithstanding.) I wonder how it’s going to play with the religious right?

The other day, as I wandered through the QFC on 15th Ave E, I spied a curious situation: Some fickle shopper, apparently, had picked up two to three jugs of laundry detergent, then lost interest in freshly laundered clothes somewhere around the produce section, and abandoned their detergent in a neatly formed row in between the spinach and the tomatoes. “That’s weird,” I thought. Then I looked closer:

Oh, silly me. It’s not laundry detergent. This jug contains “Fi-i-it Fruit & Vegetable Wash.” It’s “100% Natural!” How nice! The placement of “Fi-i-it” between said tomatoes and spinach (two vegetables contaminated by SCANDAL in the past year) is clearly no coincidence. Because vegetables are dangerous, people! Be grateful that “Fi-i-it” is looking out for you! What’s the difference between a fruit & vegetable enthusiast and a bloated, rotting, poison-soaked fruit & vegetable enthusiast? A $5 jug of “Fi-i-it.” Buy it. Buy it. Be afraid. Buy it.

You know, I’ve been a fan of fruit & vegetable wash for a long time. I have! But to be honest, I much preferred fruit & vegetable wash’s earlier work, when it was called MOTHERFUCKING WATER. Or, if you want to get all fancy, motherfucking water with a very, very small amount of dish soap in it.

To shamelessly paraphrase this joke by local comic Kevin Richards: THANKS, BUT I’M GOING TO STICK WITH THE BUILT-IN FRUIT & VEGETABLE WASH CANNON THAT CAME WITH THE APARTMENT.

Also available from the folks who brought you “Fi-i-it,” new “Wallet & Money Clip & Bank Account Wash!” Flush out those dollars, people. OR DIE.

So it looks like the feds found the kid that hacked into Sarah Palin’s Yahoo account—Osama bin Laden, of course, is still at large—and it turns out the alleged hacker is a college student and the 20 year-old son of a Democratic state representative in Tennessee.

This fact will be hashed over for umpteen hours on cable news. “Nosey college student or Democratic dirty trickster? Blah blah blah.” The fact that this kid’s alleged hacking proved that Sarah Palin was illegally conducting state business on her Yahoo account in order to skirt public record disclosure laws in Alaska? Don’t expect that fact to get much attention.

Saved after ardent supporters contributed more than 50,000 dollars to publish the next issue.

It remains to be seen if, as commenters on this post pointed out, this just means that they’re going to have to beg for money again when the next issue rolls around. That’ll get real old real fast.

While we wait to see whether our terrible, horrible, no good, very bad economy will recover—“US bail-out plan provokes doubts”—please enjoy these distractions, courtesy of the BBC:

1. Put fresh flowers in your bedroom.

When the smell of roses had been wafted under the noses of slumbering volunteers they reported experiencing pleasant emotions in their dreams.

An odour of rotten eggs had the opposite effect on the 15 sleeping women, the German scientists found.

2. In sensible countries, creationism is bad for your science career.

Professor Michael Reiss has quit as director of education at the Royal Society following the controversy over his recent comments on creationism.

3. How about we not do it in the road?

A couple in South Africa who were having sex on a railway track in Mpumalanga Province have been killed by a goods train, police say…

…the couple ignored the driver’s shouts as he moved the train into the disused station in Kinross town. “They continued with their business,” he told the Sowetan paper.

Letter of the day? It’s more like a dialogue—or an extremely lengthy email exchange—and since it’s pretty epic, most appears after the jump. And BA will see this post, so feel free to offer your own advice in comments.

We spoke briefly about my husband’s crossdressing and diaper fetish some time ago (Diaper Pals, Feb 8, 2007). After about a year and alot of work we found a “happy medium” and things toddled along fairly well for awhile. But now I’m pregnant (late first trimester) and every time he slides those nappies on I feel this overwhelming urge to throw something at him. I don’t want sex at all, must less the time-consuming extravaganza satisfying his fetish regularly requires. I just want to sleep, literally, all the time.

When I tried to delicately bring this up, he pointed out some of the “finer print” on the agreement we worked out between us, where I promised him a set number of hours a week in exchange for him not masturbating himself to the point where he doesn’t want to perform with me on “my days” (one of the issues we had). Obviously this is a situation where we need to renegotiate our deal—I am perfectly fine with him masturbating himself raw all he wants, in whatever clothing makes him happy, so long as he does it away from me as the rubbing plastic sounds grate on my nerves for some stupid reason.

I’ve brought this up, but he’s reluctant to work with me on this. He feels betrayed that I don’t want to participate anymore, despite our deal, and even further betrayed that (when he switches to his other fetish, crossdressing) I don’t find him attractive at all. One girly moan and I’m, quite literally, nauseated. I know I’m not being GGG here, but the mere thought of six more months of his claiming that I “already love the baby more than him” and saying that, if it’s a girl he “just knows he’ll be jealous” is really starting to wear me out. I’m a wreck all the time, I can’t keep a damn thing down, and I’m sick to death of his (what I consider to be) goddamn selfish attitude! We agreed on starting our family together!

Why in the hell is he acting like this NOW when it’s too late to back out?!

I need advice, pointers, something… ANYTHING to say to him. I know this can be figured out but I can’t wrap my head around how. I just can’t handle this by myself anymore!

Beyond Annoyed

Continue reading "Savage Love Letter of the Day" »

(Borrowed from today’s New York Times.)

You need to understand this chart. Given our government will be borrowing a trillion or two dollars (about a tenth or a fifth of the entire economic output of the United States in a year), you should understand how expensive this is, right now.

Start with the dark blue line. This is the annual yield the US Government (er, us the taxpayers) must pay to borrow money for three months, six months, two years, five years, ten years and thirty years.

As the length of borrowing goes up, the yield the government must pay goes up. This makes sense. If you’re going to tie up the investor’s money for longer, you should have to pay more. Why?

1. If the economy does better in the future compared to right now, interest rates are likely to go up. Therefore, convincing investors to give up their money now, for a long period of time, means you have to do a bit of bribery and pay a higher yield. (This is the optimistic interpretation.)

2. Investors might be concerned about the long-term financial health of the US government. Such investors will be more willing to lend for short periods of time, and increasingly anxious about longer commitments. If investors think the financial health of the US is at risk, they’ll expect to be paid to accept this risk.

Well, my friends, the yield curve today is indeed steep.

The yield on a 3-month bond is incredibly paltry—perhaps even less than the current rate of inflation. A yield like this makes the 3-month (and even the 6-month) bonds the equivalent of the big global mattress, where everyone is stuffing their cash—not to make it grow, just to keep it from being lost.

The fact that the short-term yields are so low, despite the massive increase in government borrowing, tells us just how spooked global investors are. Whatever money there is to be invested right now, much of it is going to the big mattress.

A year ago, the curve was really flat. (Look at the gray line at the top of the chart.) Flat—or inverted curves where yields are higher for shorter term commitments—often proceed times of economic upheaval.

So, people are still lending money to the US government for now. Maybe because they think things will get better soon. If the cost of long-term debt starts creeping up, it might be because they thing it’ll be much much worse in a few years. Should be fun to see which proves to be true.

Or, to quote our fourth branch of government, Dick Cheney, “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.” We’ll all see, Dick. We’ll all see.

Ted Tripp—pastor of Grace Fellowship Church in Hazleton, PA, and an outspoken advocate of corporal punishment—spoke before a congregation of new parents and young couples at Mars Hill Church in Ballard on Friday evening and Saturday morning. Tripp came to Mars Hill to deliver an essential lesson in Christian living: How to put the fear of God into your children.

Tripp, who’s been in the news lately because of the controversy surrounding his advocacy of corporal punishment, stood next to a drum set and amps on MH’s stage, which sometimes doubles as a live music venue called the Paradox. Tripp’s image was projected on four giant screens as he condemned modern society for being “obsessed with equality” and refusing to accept the authority of God.

Tripp stuck to dopey jokes about how children try to trick you and told the couples gathered at the Paradox and those watching the live feed at MH’s other campuses how to “win the battle for your boys’ souls.” Apparently female children are beyond saving.

Tripp’s argument for spanking was abstract: because God commanded that ancient Hebrews use “the rod,” that’s the best way to get your children to submit. “I would never have spanked my children if it wasn’t something I felt God was calling me to do,” he said. His directions, in contrast, were much more specific: “remove [the child’s] drawers,” because “we don’t want the spanking to be lost in the fabric of the pants.” Then, “take him on your lap and remind him how much you love him.” Smack him, and make sure you use a paddle that “spreads the shock over the wide area.”

The young couples nodded and eagerly took notes on how to get their children to “joyfully accept their authority”. They were all about the same age as me—college age or a little older. No one in the room looked like they were too old to be one of Tripp’s own children.

There was no sign Saturday morning of the protesters who had staked out the church the night before. During the coffee break, I spoke to a young woman about my age, who said that she’d read Tripp’s book and was glad to be able to hear him in person. Outside in the lobby, Mars Hill members were snapping up copies of Tripp’s book like they were communion wafers dipped in chocolate.

Every once in a while on the great big internets, you just come upon something that reminds you Japanese culture is completely fucking nuts:

Fluffy Milk-chan” is a world of affable characters that live a cute and slightly mischievous lifestyle. The heroine is the laid back Fluffy Milk-chan, who has friends such as the fashionable Pink Milk-chan and the trendy Tanned Milk-chan.

They’re adorable stuffed breasts. You know, for kids. I especially like the comic strips. And does Miss Can Milk have a vestigial nipple?

In 13 cars.

When you have seven homes, that’s a lot of garages to fill. After the fuss over the number of residences owned by the two presidential nominees, NEWSWEEK looked into the candidates’ cars. And based on public vehicle-registration records, here’s the score. John and Cindy McCain: 13. Barack and Michelle Obama: one.

So what are they?

McCain’s personal ride, a 2004 Cadillac CTS, is no gas sipper, but it should make Detroit happy because it’s made by General Motors. “I’ve bought American literally all my life and I’m proud,” McCain said in the interview with Detroit’s WXYZ-TV. But the rest of his fleet is not all-American. There’s a 2005 Volkswagen convertible in the garage along with a 2001 Honda sedan. Otherwise, there’s a 2007 half-ton Ford pickup truck, which might come in handy on the Sedona ranch; a vintage 1960 Willys Jeep; a 2008 Jeep Wrangler; a 2000 Lincoln; and a 2001 GMC SUV. The McCains also own three 2000 NEV Gem electric vehicles, which are bubble-shaped cars popular in retirement communities.

Only the Cadillac is registered in the candidate’s name. Cindy McCain’s name is on 11 vehicles, though not the one she actually drives. That car, a Lexus, is registered to her family’s beer-distributor business and is outfitted with personalized plates that read MS BUD.

A few years back—about ten years back now—a lefty gay academic brought out a book that argued, amongst other things, that the push for same-sex marriage was elitist. It was all about the needs of rich white gay men. Because, you see, the “sluts, prostitutes, trannies, club crawlers, and other lowlifes” that ought to be the sole focus of the gay rights movement simply weren’t interested in getting married. And since marriage rights weren’t going to do any good for sluts and hookers and porn stars, he asserted, the push for marriage rights was illegitimate. A betrayal. Because, um, because the rich white gay male academic said so.

Anyway, I wrote a column at the time pointing out that most gay men were sluts—at some point in our lives—and, like sluts everywhere, most of us eventually settle down. (I should have also pointed out that trannies can get married in most states.) But, hey, some of us could get married and continue to slut around, just like all those straight swinging sluts out there. And gay sluts, lowlifes, and prostitutes should have the same rights as straight sluts, lowlifes, and prostitutes, including marriage rights.

This all came to mind today when I read that two gay porn stars—Brent Everett and Steve Pena—announced that they’re going to be getting married on October 3 in San Diego. Congrats, boys.

This weekend brought a most exciting email to my in-box, from the one and only Goddess Kring:

it’s nice that you mentioned my art gallery exhibit in your “last days” write up for sept 5th 2008. thank you for spelling my name and the title of my show, and the art gallery name correctly! ha!

it’s however creepy and bizarre to me that you didn’t talk about my actual photography or artwork and instead mentioned some strange and negative conversation two people had i don’t even know who drank too much wine at the opening. what a lack of actual substance in your words about the opening i had. i spoke with quite a number of intelligent and interesting people that night about my work and art in general and what it means to do self portraits etc. the snide snotty style of the stranger always shocks me! …but then again the only bad publicity is no publicity. i’d love it if the stranger had more sincere substance in their articles.

First, being called “creepy and bizarre” by the Goddess Kring feels like winning a trophy.

Second, Kringen shouldn’t take Last Days’ lack of substantive comment on her photography exhibit personally—the column regularly focuses on smaller happenings at official events. For instance: Instead of writing a review of the Sex and the City movie, I’ll share the report of the Sex and the City audience member who watched a drunk frat girl try to pee in her purse on opening night.

Regarding her art, Ms. Kringen supplied me with her “statement about the meaning of my gallery exhibit” (sic throughout, bolds are mine, and special props to Shannon for capitalizing Myself):

Self Portal: Amplified Chameleon photographs by Shannon Kringen

I tend towards being an introspective person. I use my camera to create Self Portraits that amplify and exaggerate different aspects of Myself that would otherwise remain hidden within and silent.

A chameleon like variety of Passionate Self Portrait Photographs capturing very different facets. From black and white high contrast to full color in natural light with face paint to the distorted face reflected in chrome. Images that symbolize the paradox of being one person and yet having many different sides to oneself simultaneously. The Self Portrait could be seen as a metaphor using the I to represent the Macrocasm of how many different cultures we have on the planet yet it’s all one humankind.

Okay.

In other news, when I shared this email with my fella Jake, he brought up the fascinating fact that Shannon Kringen has been one of the most prolific life models for Seattle art students for over a decade. (Her only competition: the man they call Naked Santa.) And while an exhibit of Shannon Kringen photos of Shannon Kringen sounds less than interesting, an exhibit of 10 years of Seattle artists’ renderings of Shannon Kringen sounds potentially interesting, or at least more interesting than Self Portal: Amplified Chameleon. Heck, I’ll curate this exhibit myself….Got a drawing of Shannon Kringen in your portfolio you want to share? Scan it and send it to schmader@thestranger.com! If the results are interesting, maybe I’ll share them here!

Vincent Bugliosi, who wrote Helter Skelter, has written a book called The Prosecution of George W. Bush For Murder. Without any advertising budget, the book has been a steady seller on the New York Times Bestseller List.

Now, someone is trying to collect enough money to send a copy of the book to every single District Attorney in the United States. That’s 2,700 DA’s; the project will probably take $40,000. In less than a week, they’ve raised almost 6,000 bucks. I guess the thinking is that at least one DA will read the book and decide to prosecute Bush on the merits of the book. Bugliosi has already sent a copy of the book to every single one of the 50 Attorneys General in the United States. You’ve got to admire that level of W-hatred.

News from the UW:

It’s official: UW architecture and urban planning has been renamed the College of Built Environments.

Regents on Thursday, Sept. 18, approved a request from Dean Daniel S. Friedman and his faculty to change what has been the College of Architecture and Urban Planning. The new name takes effect Jan. 1.

“’College of Built Environments’ better reflects our core responsibility to 21st-century challenges — urbanization, climate change and livable communities,” said Friedman, a fellow of the American Institute of Architects. “Environmental integrity demands an increasingly interdisciplinary approach to design, planning and construction.”

“Built environment” refers to surroundings human beings construct — from cities and transportation systems to houses and gardens.

Yet another indication that we live in a post-architecture world.

And now for some random images relating to the condition of builtness:

In this morning’s Morning News, Jonah notes that Palin is now claiming she fired her public safety commissioner, Walt Monegan, not because he refused to fire her ex-brother-in-law, but because of “budgetary disagreements.”

Actually, it’s worse than that.

The allegedly “unauthorized” trip Palin now says Monegan took to Washington, D.C. was to advocate for an ambitious new initiative to address the shockingly high level of sex crimes in Alaska—an initiative Palin killed just before firing Monegan. Although Palin has since acknowledged that her office approved the trip, she’s now arguing that she opposed it because she didn’t approve of his reason for going—that is, she didn’t approve of him seeking federal money to combat sexual assault in Alaska. Calling Monegan a “rogue,” a Palin aide now says that receiving authorization to travel “does not mean that you receive blanket authorization to discuss or do whatever you would like on that trip.” Palin, in other words, now says that it would have been fine with her if Monegan had gone to D.C.—as long as he didn’t ask the government for help dealing with Alaska’s sexual-violence epidemic.

Currently, Alaska leads the nation in forcible rapes, with a rate two and a half times the national average. Women are 1.5 times more likely to be killed by a partner than the national average, and domestic violence, overall, is at “epidemic” levels. Meanwhile, the state has one of the highest levels of child sexual assault in the nation.

UPDATE: This information in this post has been clarified here.

From an email a friend is circulating:

Since 2006, Washington’s Republican Secretary of State has canceled more than 450,000 voter registrations in an effort to “clean up” the voter rolls. Sure, many are duplicate registrations or persons who moved out of state. But many are persons who think they’re properly registered and intend to vote in November. I personally know people this has happened to!

It doesn’t take much to get removed from the voter rolls. You may have been removed if, for example:

(1) you haven’t voted in a long time,
(2) your signature on your absentee ballot envelope wasn’t deemed a match with the signature on your registration card, or
(3) your absentee ballot was returned by the post office (the post office doesn’t forward ballots to your new address).

Everyone should check to make sure you are currently registered at your current address. You can do this online, and in most cases you can update your registration online. But you must make any changes by October 4!

Please take a minute to check your registration by clicking here.

Please forward this message to your friends and family! Everyone should check their registration before October 4!

Thanks!

Ooh. NOT a good day for ole Chip Maxham, weatherman…

Did you see 60 Minutes last night? An hour of questions and answers with McCain (transcript here) and Obama (transcript here). It was a lot of the same old stuff—John McCain was asked, “Longest you’ve lived any one place?” and he replied, “Hanoi”—but when Obama was asked the touchiest, trickiest question of the night, predicated on the AP/Yahoo poll that found that racial prejudice could cost Obama as much as six percentage points in November, he gave a beautiful, crazily intelligent, winning answer. The question:

I know, for a fact, that there are a lot of people out there, there are a lot of people right here in Elko, who won’t vote for you because you’re black. I mean, there’s not much you can do. But how do you deal with it? I mean, are there ways that, from a political point of view, that you can deal with it? And how do you fight that?

Obama’s answer:

Going up against a very formidable Republican machine, and having been subject to constant attack and millions of dollars spent trying to scare people over the last two months, I’m still tied or in the lead with John McCain.

That tells me that the American people are good. That they are judging me on my ideas and my vision my values, and not my skin color. Now are there gonna be some people who don’t vote for me because I’m black? Of course. There are probably some African-Americans who are voting for me because I’m black. Or maybe others who are just inspired by the idea of breaking new ground. And so I think all that’s a wash. The bottom line is am I viewed as somebody who’s gonna be a champion for the guy who’s waking up every day, working hard for a paycheck? And I’m confident that if they think I can help them, that I’ve got a shot at getting their vote. And it may take a little more work on my part. But I don’t mind working harder than the other guy.

Check that shit out. It proceeds from the reality that he is tied or in the lead, it acknowledges that some people are racists without casting himself as the victim of anything, it acknowledges that his race has helped him in certain ways, it treats as a given the inherent goodness of Americans, it doesn’t take anyone to task for (or go anywhere near mentioning) this country’s 200 years of enslaving African-Americans, it includes a shout-out to people “inspired by the idea of breaking new ground,” it makes its descent on that Clintonesque (either of them) note about working hard for the guy who gets up every day and works hard, and then there’s that amazingly humble show of strength at the end: I don’t mind working harder than the other guy. That’s amazing writing—extemporaneous, effortless. Who knows, but it seems like a good enough answer to convert a person who’s a little unsure, who’s battling with their own racial reservations. And it’s “just words.” Need it be said again? Dude can write.

The letter of my year:

Ciao Stranger,

I read your annual back to school issue, and I think you forgot to include one category. I would call it something like:

“How to avoid getting thrown into an Italian jail under the accusation of murder”
You are having the time of your life spending a semester abroad in one of the most beautiful countries in Europe. Parlando italiano, mangiando il cibo magnifico, and fucking loads of men, Italian or not. So how do you avoid those pesky murder charges? When your roomate comes home and becomes enraged when she finds you, your boyfriend, and the local drug dealer engaged in a hash transaction, do not: one, toss her cell phones out the window when she tries to call the police, two, do not threaten her with a knife, and then accidentally kill her. Instead, tell her to fuck off, stomp out of the house, finish the drug deal at the boyfriend’s house, and find a new roomate.


Hope this will be useful to future students going abroad!

Sincerely,

Theo

I probably wouldn’t point out that Sarah Palin is a Bircher who plans to speak at a rally organized by John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel, a group that believes that all “non-believers,” including Jews, Muslims, and mainline Christians (sorry, Methodists!) will suffer the torture of eternal damnation if they don’t convert.

In unrelated news, Serious Eats reports that sales of Palin Syrah have dropped precipitously in San Francisco since McCain announced his VP pick. Californians: So elitist, they’re practically French!

Film

‘Burn After Reading’

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Sorry it’s taken me so long to find another book worthy of Book Club of the Damned, but I think I’ve found the next selection. Bookgasm highlights Travis Thrasher’s Isolation. Thrasher is a Christian horror novelist.

With its elements of a strained marriage and a family spending a winter in a remote lodge that is not their own, ISOLATION immediately reminds one of Stephen King’s THE SHINING — an association that very well may be on purpose, given Thrasher’s reference to the book in his own, as well as a thank-you note to King on the acknowledgments page for a career influence.

Anyone want to bet I can’t read the whole thing?

It’s sad that all the real journalists are either on The View or veterans of The View.

Sarah Palin won’t hold press conferences. Says the Washington Post…

JOHN McCAIN selected Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to be his running mate 23 days ago. Since then, Ms. Palin has not held a single news conference with the national media. She has answered only a handful of questions from voters and reporters…. Mr. McCain’s selection of an inexperienced and relatively unknown figure was unsettling, and the campaign’s decision to keep her sequestered from serious interchanges with reporters and voters serves only to deepen the unease. Mr. McCain is entitled to choose the person he thinks would be best for the job. He is not entitled to keep the public from being able to make an informed assessment of that judgment. Ms. Palin’s speech-making skills are impressive, but the more she repeats the same stump speech lines, the queasier we get. Nor have her answers to the gentle questioning she has encountered provided any confidence that Ms. Palin has a grasp of the issues.

Says Sullivan…

There are only a few weeks to go before the United States may pick a potential president who has never given a press conference as a candidate for national office. This is not a functioning democracy.

Says my buddy Alice…

It’s time for the Dems (or the press corps!) to arrange to have a woman in a chicken suit follow Palin everywhere until she gives interviews to the press. If the chicken has to wear lipstick to avoid charges of sexism, so be it.

Alice is right. Lord knows if Palin were a Democrat and ducking the press, Young Republicans in chicken suits would be swarming all over her events carrying signs that said “What the Cluck is Sarah Hiding?” and “Chicken Run!”

So who’s going to do it? Who’s going to launch Operation Chicken Shit?

This report of a very unpleasant evening stroll in Madison Park came to me last week, but the details were just confirmed by the Seattle Police Department this morning.

The incident is not quite as bad as some of the other gay-bashings that have happened on Capitol Hill this year, but for Sarah, 28, and her partner Whitley, 27, it was still an unhappy night.

Here’s the email I received from Sarah about the incident:

my (female) partner and i live on howell st. not far from mlk (madison valley? madrona? the cd?) and decided to take a walk to the lake last night via madison park.

we reached the end of madison, turned around, and were heading back home—engrossed in conversation and holding hands—when we heard a woman who we had just passed mumble something like, “get that out of here.”

we both stopped, turned around, and very non-aggressively asked her if she had said something to us. she proceeded to raise her voice and ask us if we were both women. when we said yes, she repeated that we were both women and stated that we were holding hands. she then proclaimed that we were lesbians and that lesbians were not wanted in madison park.

she continued to become escalated despite the little resistance she got from us (we were both shocked) and screamed on the sidewalk that madison park was her neighborhood and that lesbians weren’t wanted there and that we should “go back to capitol hill.”

we didn’t say much but we did ask her if she was serious and if she was really talking to other human beings that way. she replied (still yelling) that she was “goddamn serious” and to get out of her neighborhood. i asked her if she was drunk to try to embarrass her in front of her friend who stood silently by her side. she yelled that she wasn’t drunk and that “this is america and america doesn’t tolerate lesbians.”

she then pulled a male passerby into the conversation by yelling, “he’ll tell you. we don’t want lesbians in our neighborhood, do we?” the man quickly took our side, standing with us and apologizing on behalf of madison park (he said he’d lived there for 20 years and had never seen anything like this). he told her she was wrong and then left.

in hindsight, of course i wish i had reacted with anger and quick words. instead, my state of shock at being singled out and yelled at on a relatively quiet night in the middle of the sidewalk turned into sobbing in the middle of the sidewalk. the woman stood and watched with her arms crossed as i broke down right then and there—still waiting for us to leave her neighborhood.

my partner put her arm around me and brought me to a bench half a block away, and all of a sudden, seemingly out of nowhere, the bartender from bing’s came up to us and said he had heard me crying. he didn’t know what was wrong but said he brought a sprite to make me feel better. we told him the story and he asked what she looked like (in case she’s a customer) and consoled us and gave just the kind of compassion we both needed.

our family/roommates came to pick us up, we thanked the bartender, and are now processing the fact that our romantic walk culminated in a 60-year-old woman (seemingly not mentally ill, per se) spewing hate and bigotry and trying to rally a passerby to gang up on us.

thank you to the bing’s bartender and to the man who stood with us and told her she was wrong. this was the first time i was harassed by a woman and the first time i was harassed in seattle. luckily we weren’t physically injured but it was shocking and completely devastating. thank you for reading this and maybe even spreading the word.

Because there was no physical violence involved, the police have classified the incident as a disturbance—and not, for example, as malicious harassment, the common designation for violent hate crimes.

But Sarah and her partner were told the incident will be added to the police department’s list of gay-related disturbances this year.

That photograph, by Levi Clark, is a detail of the Monique Lofts mural project (which first appeared on Slog here, and then later, in a discussion of the ghost signage here). More photos and a short video are here.

The mural’s almost finished. It’s sort of like a Technicolor version of Superman’s Fortress of Solitude. It also reinforces the fashion for the crystals (okay, okay, polyhedrons) in art these days.

This morning on my way to work I asked NKO and Joe, who’ve been spending 14-hour days on the mural in order to finish by the time they have to return the equipment: why the crystals? The intention was to use a visual language reminiscent of graffiti but not imitating it (after all, this mural is sanctioned), they said.

Another reason: these shapes are easy to buff. The piece has already been tagged twice.

The “opening” party for the mural will be October 11 from 3-7 pm at Grey Gallery and in the street.

There are a lot of readings tonight, including a book about Marco Polo up at Third Place Books and a book at the University Book Store that is described thusly: “New deities fight to join the formal pantheon of the Gods in this new Mazalan book.” There is also an open mic.

Chuck Klosterman reads at Elliott Bay Book Company tonight. He’s written a novel called Downtown Owl. I gave our copy of Downtown Owl to Eric Grandy to read during his recent trip to New York City. During his flight, he got about sixty pages into the book before being distracted by DirecTV, and then apparently he didn’t think about it again until I asked him about it this morning. That might be all you need to know about Downtown Owl.

At the University Book Store, Bernard-Henri Lévy reads from his newest book, Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism. This morning, I heard Mr. Lévy on NPR talk about the election and how it is imperative to vote for Obama. It occurred to me that if most of the people I went to high school with heard a man with a thick French accent talk on the radio about what was wrong with America and then endorse Obama, they’d probably vote for McCain out of spite. I’m so glad I don’t live in Maine anymore.

And at Town Hall, Dexter Filkins reads from The Forever War, which is about Iraq and Afghanistan. To hear the television networks tell it, Iraq has become a non-issue in this election, but you should still go to this reading: Iraq still matters, for reasons both obvious and not obvious. (And, as an aside, it’s lovely to see a book about current events with such a beautiful cover. Normally, they just slap a photo up there and call it a day, but you can tell that a designer actually thought about this book cover. Good job, nameless book designer!)

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

So last night brought the 4,086th primetime Emmy Awards ceremony, which was long and weird and boring.

There were definitely bright spots, most notably the triumph of Tina Fey and 30 Rock. (Confidential to Alec Baldwin: Praising Tina Fey as “the Elaine May of her generation” is neither complimentary nor factually accurate. Tina Fey became the Elaine May of her generation 10 years ago, and now she’s something else all her own. The nearest precedent: Mary Tyler Moore, if Mary Tyler Moore had created and written The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which is a huge “if.” Also, this (great) New Yorker profile makes you look insane.)

But all this pales in comparison to the deeply unfortunate, extraordinarily long TV-theme medley performed by nouveau crooner Josh Groban.

Groban is a monster, but it must be said that he’s trapped in a no-win situation. Performing a quick-cut TV-show medley is like giving a speech in Klingon: There’s no way to do it and not look stupid, and the “better” you are at it, the stupider you look.

Suicide is painless, indeed.

An old interview with Dark Man X, but a great set of responses from a man who somehow managed (even in March, at the height of the Democratic primary drama) to have a no idea who Obama was. Via Sullivan:

Are you following the presidential race? Not at all.

You’re not? You know there’s a Black guy running, Barack Obama and then there’s Hillary Clinton.
His name is Barack?!

Barack Obama, yeah.
Barack?!

Barack.
What the fuck is a Barack?! Barack Obama. Where he from, Africa?

Yeah, his dad is from Kenya.
Barack Obama?

Yeah.
What the fuck?! That ain’t no fuckin’ name, yo. That ain’t that nigga’s name. You can’t be serious. Barack Obama. Get the fuck outta here.

You’re telling me you haven’t heard about him before.
I ain’t really paying much attention.

I mean, it’s pretty big if a Black…
Wow, Barack! The nigga’s name is Barack. Barack? Nigga named Barack Obama. What the fuck, man?! Is he serious? That ain’t his fuckin’ name. Ima tell this nigga when I see him, “Stop that bullshit. Stop that bullshit” [laughs] “That ain’t your fuckin’ name.” Your momma ain’t name you no damn Barack.

Continue reading "DMX on BHO" »

From last night’s Emmy Awards:

[Fey] even shrugged off her resemblance to Gov. Sarah Palin, whom she won raves for portraying on the season premiere of “Saturday Night Live”…

“I want to be done playing this lady Nov. 5,” she said. “So if anybody can help me be done playing this lady Nov. 5, that would be good for me.”

News from the underworld:

Miners in Lesotho have discovered a huge gem stone which may become the largest ever polished diamond.

The stone weighs 478 carats and is the 20th largest rough diamond ever found, said Gem Diamonds.

The company said the uncut rock was recovered recently from the Letseng mine, owned by the company in Lesotho.

The diamond, which is as yet unnamed, has the potential to yield a 150 carat cut stone, and could sell for tens of millions of dollars, the company said.

This brilliant piece of news recalls an equally brilliant passage in Foucault’s The Order of Things—a passage that considers a tendency in pre-modern thought/episteme/paradigm to correspond the “terrestrial and celestial,” the heavenly with the “glittering, hidden veins where metals grow in darkness.” There was the blackness of space and the blackness of the caves; the stars in the eternal darkness of space and the “treasures buried in the earth since the creation of the world.” “The dark dangerous, and accursed glitter of metal…[and] that other glitter that sings at the far end of the night.”

Doesn’t West Seattle has enough trouble with the baby beaters at Mars Hill? Does it really need the Scientologists too?

I have to say I was ashamed of my city yesterday when I went to the second Storm playoff game against the LA Sparks and Key Arena was half empty. This is our ONLY professional basketball team, and the city’s only WINNING FUCKING TEAM! What is wrong here?! Well, I figured that part of it is that there has been like zero marketing. Most people I talk to had no idea we were even in the playoffs. So where is my favorite Seattle weekly on this? Huh? There was a whole lot of bitching about the Sonics leaving town, but no one can support an actual good basketball team? Why, because they’re women and know how to pass a ball around? Jesus Christ.

Come on guys, let’s get people out there to support our team! Tuesday, 6pm at Key Arena.

Carollani

You can buy tickets to tomorrow night’s game here.

The first presidential debate is this Friday, which means we’re entering the final days—or final 40+ days—of this long, long presidential campaign. I don’t know how you feel about all that, but I do know that if you care about politics you probably won’t want to be alone at the end of this. Thankfully, there’s a place for people like you to go on election night:

A Likely Story:Palin now claims Troopergate firing was over budgetary disagreements.

Checking Out: At least 53 dead in Pakistan hotel bombing.

Assassination Vacation: US military on the lookout for hit squads in Iraq.

China Syndrome: 12,000 Chinese babies poisoned by tainted milk.

Minor Offenses: Arkansas church compound raided in child porn investigation.

Dumped: Report says EPA is allowing toxic material to be shipped overseas.

Welcome to the New World Odor: Israeli police develop stink bomb for crowd control.

Good Thing You Weren’t Carbon Dating!Scientists check Stonehenge’s ID, find out it’s younger than it looks.

Check back all week long for McCain and Palin’s Greatest Hits:

Via the Wall Street Journal:

Deleveraging started with securities tied to subprime mortgages, where defaults started rising rapidly in 2006. But the deleveraging process has now spread well beyond, to commercial real estate and auto loans to the short-term commitments on which investment banks rely to fund themselves. In the first quarter, financial-sector borrowing slowed to a 5.1% growth rate, about half of the average from 2002 to 2007. Household borrowing has slowed even more, to a 3.5% pace….

Hedge funds could be among the next problem areas. Many rely on borrowed money to amplify their returns. With banks under pressure, many hedge funds are less able to borrow this money now, pressuring returns. Meanwhile, there are growing indications that fewer investors are shifting into hedge funds while others are pulling out. Fund investors are dealing with their own problems: Many have taken out loans to make their investments and are finding it more difficult now to borrow.

The Wall Street Journal is right about one thing: the massive deleveraging of the whole global financial system is at the core of our present crisis.

What is leveraging? Investing with borrowed money.

When you’ve gotten those “Low Introductory Rate!” credit card offers, maybe you’ve been tempted to get the card, max out the cash advance, take that money and put it somewhere safe. Say the card has a 3% interest rate. You put the money in a 5% a year high-yield savings account. When the credit card rate is about to jump up, you take the money out of the savings account, pay off the card and pocket the difference. That’s leveraging.

If you’re mid-scheme, and the card’s rate unexpectedly jumped, you’d be doomed. Particularly if those low rate card offers are much harder to find. That’s deleveraging.

Over at Dearscience.org, with another shitty cartoon, I attempt to walk through why the highly leveraged investment banks on Wall Street imploded so thoroughly this month.

In the meantime, our wallets are being raided, to the tune of about a trillion dollars. To put this in perspective, the entire economic output of the United States, for one year, is about ten trillion dollars. One tenth of an entire year’s work is being poured into the crumbling foundations of Wall Street. And, this possibly will be insufficient to do more than temporarily slow the cascading failure.

Can anyone tell me why banks like this deserve to be saved? Why highly leveraged schemes like this are in any way desirable? What social benefit are we receiving from their continued existence?

Thanks to the new, draconian, bankruptcy bill, if we engaged in this sort of reckless get rich quick scheme, we’d be ruined when it unraveled. Why should we be ruined—for getting sick without health insurance, for buying a house at the peak of a bubble—but Wall Street saved?

The economist Nouriel Roubini is still on fire about the transformation of “the USA into the USSRA (United Socialist State Republic of America)”:

The lesson of this sad and sleazy episode is that when profits are privatized and losses are socialized we get sleaze capitalism and corporate welfare that becomes public bailout of reckless lenders. All this from a US administration that hypocritically praises every other day the virtues of private markets capitalism. For all of us who do truly believe in free market economies where a variety of public goods are provided by governments and the financial sector is properly supervised and regulate this is not a capitalist system but rather socialism for the rich.

The real McCain:

A Trip

Puyallup Fair

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It’s Sunday and unless you’ve got Sunday Ticket, prepare to be bored. The only game on this morning is the bound-to-be-lopsided Bengals/Giants matchup. Zzzzzz.

The “Hawks host the Rams at 1, which should be good for a W before we head into our much-needed bye week. Koren Robinson is a Seahawk again but might not play today because of knee troubles. We’ll see.

Sorry I didn’t post a wrap-up this week, but here are the current standings in the All-Slog 2008 Fantasy Football Thunderdome League of Champions™:

1. Slogaholics 2-0-0 2. Green Giants 2-0-0 3. The Tight Ends 2-0-0 4. Rightwing Feminists 1-1-0 5. The Ahmadinejad Show 1-1-0 6. Evergreen Stoners 1-1-0 7. Hass’s Thunderbolts 1-1-0 8. Hochuli’s Guns 1-1-0 9. New Orleans Taints 1-1-0 10. Bwee&Gwee’s Dingbats 0-2-0 11. Hasselbecks Hairline 0-2-0 12. worst team ever. 0-2-0

Predictions, kvetching, etc. in the comments.

Thanks to Grant for the video.

Two readings and an open mic today.

At Third Place Books, Steven Erickson reads from Toll the Hounds, which is a fantasy book. The cover to the left is the U.K. edition. I bet you that the U.S. edition will not have as neat a cover. I don’t know why that’s the way it is, but it is.

And at Elliott Bay Book Company, Twyla Tharp discusses creativity and dance and such. Brendan Kiley calls her the “cranky grande dame of dance,” which is a title that is almost enough to get me to show up on its own merits.

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