Can this BiOp be saved? That's the underlying question this morning when the usual suspects appear in federal court to argue for what may (but probably won't) be the last time over the government's biological opinion on operation of its Columbia River dam system.
Over the last two weeks, U.S.' [...]
The two main ways “execute” is defined: “to accomplish a plan” and “to put to death.”
Lately the Seattle Seahawks offense executes in the latter fashion: Play is called; play walks down the gridiron equivalent of death row; play dies.
Were it a Sean Penn movie, the Seattle offense would be [...]
On Monday the Seattle City Council will take final votes on a 2010 budget. The proposed budget, despite these financially lean times, actually has a lot to like. (I chair the council's budget committee, so I'm somewhat partial to the results.)
As proposed, the council budget restores hours to the' [...]
On Monday the Seattle City Council will take final votes on a 2010 budget. The proposed budget, despite these financially lean times, actually has a lot to like. (I chair the council's budget committee, so I'm somewhat partial to the results.)
As proposed, the council budget restores hours to the' [...]
On Wednesday the Metropolitan Democratic Club hosted a lunchtime panel that discussed bills now being considered by the Washington Legislature to decriminalize marijuana possession. House Bill 1177 and Senate Bill 5615 would reclassify possession of small amounts of marijuana from misdemeanor status to infractions more like driving [...]
Crosscut held its first Members-only party Thursday night, using the event as a housewarming for our new offices in Belltown and a way to thank lots of new Charter Members. Nice crowd, nice vibes. Thanks to our Marilyn Hoe for all the party prep, to Hale's Ales for the brews,' [...]
Editor's note: Monte Enbysk, an experienced (but not elite) runner, was thrown off his Seattle Marathon training schedule by an injury last month. He's chronicling his comeback effort and — if he makes it — his race day for Crosscut. His previous installments are available here.
As I finish my [...]
The tale of Seattle’s founding in the 1850s has not had much in the way of new scholarship lately. Like a Colorforms playset, the mostly two-dimensional characters have acted out a Thanksgiving pageant of sorts for much of living memory — pioneers, Indians, trappers, missionaries (along with Henry Yesler and [...]
Another familiar voice has been stricken from the local airwaves, as KVI AM 570 let go morning talk show host Kirby Wilbur last week. Fisher Communications, owners of KVI (and KOMO AM-FM-TV, KPLZ, and other local stations), posted a statement on the KVI website acknowledging Wilbur’s 16 years [...]
The cost of democracy in America is mind-boggling. As of Nov. 1, without even considering federal, state, and county elections, Seattle alone has campaigns that will spend over $5.3 million. Think about what that kind of money would do for some of our more egregious social, environmental, or infrastructure problems. [...]
The Seattle Seahawks finally got a little better, just in time to play their way out of post-season contention. A club that last week couldn’t run well enough to catch a parked bus lost its nominal featured back early during the Sunday defeat against division-leading Arizona then put up better [...]
It's best to avoid getting drawn into stories about political intrigue and rivalries and to focus on bottom-line policy results in judging presidencies and presidential candidacies. But two events over the past week in the Obama White House were symptoms of internal strain. They both involved the exits of highly professional and [...]
Life on an island can get lonely.
I thought I was prepared for that, but shortly after we moved in there came a day when my husband went to work and my daughter left for school and I felt like I’d slipped into an Ingmar Bergman film: Everything was pale sun [...]
Editor's note: Monte Enbysk, an experienced (but not elite) runner, was thrown off his Seattle Marathon training schedule by an injury last month. He's chronicling his comeback effort and — if he makes it — his race day for Crosscut. His previous installments appeared here and here.
I’m hungry [...]
We now are at the early stages of the so-called Hot Stove League season when speculation about baseball trades and signings dominates the attention of diehard baseball fans. ("Hot Stove" derives from the early 20th century time when fans gathered in the off-season around hot stoves to exchange baseball lore and gossip).
Most local attention [...]
The U.S. Board of Geographic Names approved the name Salish Sea today in a unanimous vote. The name is now officially accepted nationally, as well as in Washington State. It has been approved in British Columbia by the province's names board, and Canadian national approval is expected. The vote was [...]
What a deep-sea downer to learn this morning that the Ivar’s underwater billboards were a hoax! I should have known better, but I have a history of falling for tall tales — Paul Bunyan, UFOs, Colin Powell at the U.N., to name just a few examples.
And I have a [...]
It’s rare that I engage in hero worship. But for Sandra Day O’Connor, there is no amount of esteem that is too great.
She was, of course, the first woman to serve on the United States Supreme Court. But I’m not so easily swayed. This impressed me; it did not inspire [...]
As the state’s unemployment rate climbs ever higher, the people in charge of mailing checks to the jobless are trying to get the word out: Let us help you find work.
A new study by the state Employment Security Department concludes that people who used the services of WorkSource, [...]
Here in Seattle Veterans Day coincides with the height of the rainy season, which seems fitting given the wretched weather that the soldiers endured in France in the weeks leading up to the 1918 Armistice that Veterans Day commemorates.
“During the night, a cold penetrating rain began,” one soldier wrote of [...]
Somehow my father, an urban planning professor, once obtained the copy of the the 1911 Bogue Plan of Seattle owned by J.W. Maxwell, who served on the Municipal Plans Commission that commissioned Bogue's work. For many years, I have used the plan as a coffee table provocateur. But in [...]
Somehow my father, an urban planning professor, once obtained the copy of the the 1911 Bogue Plan of Seattle owned by J.W. Maxwell, who served on the Municipal Plans Commission that commissioned Bogue's work. For many years, I have used the plan as a coffee table provocateur. But in [...]
It’s been 20 years since the Evergreen State celebrated its centennial, and Washington State History Museum Director David Nicandri was responsible for much of the festivities that took place back in 1989. Exactly 20 years later, on Wednesday, Nicandri kicks off a long farewell of sorts, by curating a [...]
In a small blue collar cafe I overheard a table of people talking about what qualities a good Seattle City Council member might possess. Top of the list was: Would they have good sense? Chortling followed, interspersed with bursts of laughter, as they suggested various life experiences they mused would [...]
“GO FOR TWO!”
Such was the stentorian roar late Saturday afternoon from the front seats at the Duchess Tavern, possibly the second-best place in the world to watch Husky football.
The University of Washington had just nudged up the point count 22-14 against UCLA at the Rose Bowl. An [...]
Some expected this election to express the voter's desire for sweeping change, but in Washington, that wasn't the case. Voters in Seattle cast their votes for change in the dog days of August when they ousted two-term incumbent mayor Greg Nickels in the primary, but by fall, the electorate was' [...]
For the second time in slightly more than a week, local TV and radio stations devoted a fair portion of their early afternoon schedules to live, commercial-free coverage of a local event. Unlike Boeing’s announcement on October 28 that the company had selected South Carolina for the second 787 line, [...]
On the fourth day of extremely close results in the Seattle mayoral race, Mike McGinn widened his lead over opponent Joe Mallahan. In an updated count released Friday afternoon, McGinn had 49.99 percent of the vote, to Mallahan's 49.19 percent. That amounts to a lead of just 1,209 votes [...]
It was fitting that Whidbey Island's New Media 2012 conference was scheduled the same day in September as the annual Langley Soup Box Derby. You see, the Langley Soup Box Derby is from another millennium. It was created in 1972 by supporters of the Soup Coop, a hippie hangout [...]
Seattle’s venerable Museum of History & Industry celebrates the city’s past, and the museum’s future, tonight at the old Naval Reserve Armory at Lake Union Park. MOHAI has relocated the annual History Makers dinner to the Armory (from the gala’s previous locations at the Olympic Hotel and the Rainier [...]
New York City is littered with places like Ground Zero where the aspirations for grand architecture have left dead zones. Meanwhile, thanks to an enlightened director of Design and Construction, David Burney, a British architect, all kinds of great little buildings (firehouses, libraries, community centers) have sneaked into the Big [...]
Ralph Waldo Emerson asked, “How much of human life is lost in waiting?” Think of the mayoral candidates.
[...]Now that there is nothing more to be done, no more ballots to be taxied to Sea-Tac, no more signs to staple-gun on the walls, no more calls to feisty undecideds to be made by fleets of unsung volunteers, we who have signed on to volunteer for one of the [...]
Joining a long line of local media celebrities who have sought elected office (and unlike former KIRO anchor Susan Hutchison), former KING host John Curley appears headed to victory in his bid for a seat on the Sammamish City Council.
“For the record, only 22 percent of the vote has [...]
Is is something in the water?
R-71, the gay partner benefits referendum, looks to be passing statewide (51 percent yes, 49 percent no), driven by the "yes" vote in 10 of Washington's 39 counties, all of them bordering the Salish Sea. In fact, only two counties on Puget Sound did [...]
Here's a quick summary, based on the votes counted by Tuesday night. In Seattle, the mayor's race is very tight, with Mike McGinn ahead of Joe Mallahan, 50-49. Some of the big margins were: Sally Bagshaw, 69-31 over City Council opponent David Bloom; Mike O'Brien 58-42 over Robert Rosencrantz (surprisingly' [...]
Some kids have two mommies, but Cascadia has two Vancouvers, which causes confusion. Vancouver, BC is known world-wide, and Vancouver, WA is mostly known as a growing suburb of Portland, Ore. Some residents of Vancouver, WA are interested in re-branding their city, distinguishing it from their better-known neighbor to the [...]
In October of 1991, I was living on the Iron Range of Minnesota with my first husband and our two sons.
It was a tough place, a harbor town filled with silent taconite mines and for-sale signs. Unemployment was 12 percent. My husband worked as a printer during the day; he [...]
Once while I was phone-banking, a woman I’d called interrupted my briefing on a political issue involving human services with a question. “Do you know what ‘Thy kingdom come’ means?” she asked. “Um, I think so,” I replied. “Well,” she said, “that’s why I don’t bother voting. I only have [...]
Doug Todd at the Vancouver Sun has a fascinating column that gets at a little explored aspect of Northwest values: how an environmentalist could also be a "neo-Nazi."
Occasionally down in Washington, right-wingers (like the minions of the Building Industry Association of Washington) accuse greens of being eco-Nazis, typical [...]
For nearly a year, weary, beleaguered Seattle Seahawks fans have been hearing how their legions wouldn’t finish 4-12 the way they did in 2008, when the Hawks lost control of the reliably winnable National Football League division they’d dominated for much of the past decade.
Partisans didn’t realize that, while the [...]
Halloween falls on a Saturday this year, and that's scary. Really, what's spookier — along with all that undistributed candy hanging around the house — than the prospect of sexed-up, partying-down grown-ups with a whole day to plan their festivities and a whole day to recover before Monday morning calls?
It [...]
Washington state mapmakers will have to juggle space when they update Northwest maps and charts. The State Board of Geographic Names has voted to designate the inland salt waters of Cascadia, roughly from Campbell River and Desolation Sound in British Columbia to the southern coves of Puget Sound as the [...]
Below is this week's "Marketplace Minute," from American Public Media radio host Bill Radke.
[...]Watching Michael Jackson’s This Is It was a bittersweet experience. On one hand the film gives a glimpse into what surely would have been one of the biggest concert spectacles in music history and it is one of the best concert films I have seen. On the other I found [...]
Film enthusiasts will remember the classic World War II films entitled Why We Fight, giving both our military forces and civilians reasons to defend home and hearth against Nazi and Japanese aggression.
A present day local version, providing reasons to make a fresh start in 2010 with a new mayor [...]
As the news broke of Boeing picking South Carolina over Washington for the location of the second 787 line Wednesday afternoon, Seattle media outlets rushed to get on the air with the story.
On the TV side, KING (simulcast on Northwest Cable News) took the offensive just after 2 p.m. with [...]
“Seattle Times daily circulation up sharply” was the headline on the Times’ upbeat story after the latest six-month circulation figures were posted this week by an industry monitor, the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC). And so it seemed, with the average paid daily circulation of the Times standing at [...]
Gov. Gregoire just finished an artful press conference, disclaiming any responsibility for Boeing's decision to build a second 787 production line in North Charleston, S.C., noting again that Boeing had told her there was nothing the state could do about the decision. The governor then tried to shift the public's' [...]
While media were focusing on the impasse in Boeing-Machinists talks and on South Carolina's enticements to move major operations to that state, other Boeing-related developments were taking place with less attention.
In Washington, D.C., Boeing and Northrup Grumman intensified their jousting over the award of the contract for aerial refueling tankers. [...]
The Audit Bureau of Circulations this week announced figures for the six-month period ending Sept. 30, and the year-over-year drop in average weekday print circulation among 379 U.S. daily newspapers was 10.6 percent. That's not strictly due to people simply walking away from print. Over that year, [...]
Seattle is in a funk. Businesses are struggling. Unemployment is high. The city budget needs a trim. An urban center long admired because it worked so well has become a place that can't deliver basic services. Fortunately Seattle’s two mayoral candidates, Whatshisname and The Other Guy, offer fresh ideas, bold' [...]
The Washington Department of Transportation has posted a scary "what-if" video of what would happen to the Seattle waterfront in the event of a quake that was just a little closer and longer than the 2001 Nisqually quake. You get to see how things are predicted to come apart: [...]
Bygone, sagely Seahawks leader Chuck Knox once tested local football scribes about the key statistic in football. Some of his accidental pupils waxed wisely about punt hang times and fourth-down, go-for-it decisions, after which Knox, pausing for Olivier-like dramatic timing, stated with exquisite simplicity:
“The key statistic in football is points [...]
Bill Radke, the popular former KUOW voice who now hosts American Public Media's Marketplace Morning Report, is building a following among social-media fans as well as regular listeners for his new feature, a weekly summary of business news delivered as a 60-second poem.
Radke brings his trademark charm and wit [...]
Bill Radke, the popular former KUOW voice who now hosts American Public Media's Marketplace Morning Report, is building a following among social-media fans as well as regular listeners for his new feature, a weekly summary of business news delivered as a 60-second poem.
Radke brings his trademark charm and wit [...]
Sure, with Boeing trying to build jets here (and not, for the next few weeks anyway, in South Carolina), Seattle people pay extra attention to aviation and all things aeronautical. But now there’s something in the air everywhere all of a sudden. Literally.
Last week, it was a 6-year old [...]
The Hold Steady mixes well with alcohol — after all they have been labeled “America’s bar band” by critics and fans — so pairing the Brooklyn quintet with Southern Comfort for a free concert at The Crocodile Thursday night was a no-brainer.
The Kentucky-based booze sponsored the invite-only event that was [...]
It’s a time of extremes for Seattle’s famous literary scene. From the “It was a dark and stormy night” shelf, literary sleuths have been looking for clues all week as to whether Elliott Bay Book Company is really pulling up stakes from its longtime Pioneer Square location or just [...]
In our day a candidate can speak sincerely, yet one ad can argue breach of trust or "flip-flop" and call for the guillotine to fall. What if negative ads had controlled the actual guillotines, events in Tolkien's world or the views of classic philosophers? We may not have liked such [...]
The recent death of the distinguished American choreographer Merce Cunningham raised anew the question of preserving dance works. What happens to the material created by a choreographer who dies, particularly one whose own company was the vehicle for the work?
In Cunningham’s case there was a plan devised, with his [...]
Editor's note: Part 1 of "Island Girl" ran in the Crosscut Blog on Monday.
For 21 hours, my husband was held in the county jail in a town 39 miles and several land masses away. He was not permitted to call his new employer and explain why he hadn’t showed [...]
Some Seattle voters seem proud to announce to you that they've already voted, like smug students who turned in their homework assignment early for extra credit. In an election like this, I don't see why an early vote has any upside: There's a long way to go before election day' [...]
In April, Danny Westneat wrote a compelling column in The Seattle Times about the "victory" of a decision on the viaduct replacement. He suggested such decisions are often predicated on incomplete information about cost overruns. He cited a notable British study on the psychology of public works projects. He concluded with remarkable [...]
Nick Holt is so animated along the Washington sidelines that some may wonder if during a prior incarnation the Husky football defensive coordinator was a Warner Bros. cartoon character.
In fact, Holt's only known show-biz connection seems to be that his granddad was athlete-actor Buster Crabbe, appropriate if only because Holt' [...]
Here was my introduction to Washington.
I drove from Minneapolis: North Dakota, Montana, Idaho. Five days on the road with two incredibly bored teenagers. (No, the Rocky Mountains are not spectacular, Mom.) Our puttery little car was barely capable of pulling the U-Haul trailer. Once, on a steep incline, we almost [...]
File this story under belaboring the obvious: "Drinking Your Way to Health? Perhaps Not." Is it really news that consuming booze isn't the way to fitness and health? I always thought of winos as the paragons of physical specimens, akin to Greek Gods.
Maybe there are a few idiots' [...]
As the centennial celebration of Seattle’s first world’s fair winds down, KCTS is presenting a one-hour documentary to cap the festivities. The film about the wacky 1909 Alaska-Yukon Pacific Exposition that took place on the UW campus, appropriately called “Seattle’s Forgotten World’s Fair,” was produced by videographer John Forsen [...]
Steven Clifford, the New Jersey-born writer whose Flip Side columns explore the human condition with a visionary power and brutal honesty that compel us to confront the alienation of the individual in an unmoored society, is the surprise winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Announcing the award in Stockholm, [...]
Perhaps people do exist who are truly agnostic when it comes to their preferred computer operating system, happy to work with whatever is at hand. Haven't met many of those. More common are the fervid Mac people or the die-hard Windows crowd or those Linux true believers and so on. Motivations' [...]
Twenty years ago at a party in Seattle it was fun and lively to get into a backyard discussion with other men on the subject of heating your house with a wood-fueled stove. (Now the talk is about retrofitting your house for earthquake — an expensive and terrifying prospect.) We [...]
Football has been described as “a game of inches,” but partisans of the University of Washington Huskies and Seattle Seahawks now know only too well that, as the name would indicate, it’s a game of feet.
Actually, one needed only be witness to the Huskies’ Saturday soiree with the University of [...]
On the first U.S. tour date of his first solo tour in 24 years, Roger Daltrey did something he’d never done before. He covered a Pearl Jam song.
The song was “Better Man” and it’s debatable whether it was a cover, considering Eddie Vedder appeared onstage sporting a smile as big [...]
Heading toward Halloween, with 2010 congressional elections still a full year away, collars are getting tight in Washington, D.C., as both Democrats and Republicans measure pending issues for their political portent.
With the economy still weak — although apparently headed for recovery in coming months — Republicans presently have hopes of [...]
Frank Blethen was the lunchtime entertainment at the Northwest Journalism Conference at Seattle University Saturday. While media, professors, and students munched wraps and attempted to digest a variety of panels about the changing nature of journalism in the electronic age, conference organizer Barry Mitzman (a Crosscut board member and former [...]
October 12 has been a hallowed date for Pacific Northwest weather fans since 1962, when the infamous Columbus Day Storm blew through Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia leaving death and destruction in its path.
The storm — nicknamed “The Big Blow” — blew in on a Friday afternoon, doing its most [...]
As we go through the stages of loss in this recession, are we at the point of making some hard choices yet? There is some flailing about and gnashing of teeth — tossing out a Seattle mayor, getting King County out of the animal-shelter business. A lame-duck county executive might [...]
When the City of Seattle and 4Culture, King County’s arts and heritage agency, announced earlier this year that they would hand out $500,000 in federal economic stimulus money to preserve jobs at cultural non-profits, most heritage organizations thought few if any of the dollars would ever reach them. That’s because [...]
It’s been a tough couple of weeks for local radio in Seattle. KING-FM is having financial problems. Marty Riemer got canned at KMTT. And the pledge drive has started up at KUOW. It’s enough to drive anyone to an AAA (Alternate Audio Appliance).
And traditional radio — the kind that many [...]
Having grown up on the Pogo comic in the newspapers, I assumed that possums were cute little critters. I even felt a tinge of sadness when I drove past a DOR (dead on the road) possum, it having been nailed by an auto as it (the possum) was contentedly feeding [...]
With the demise of Gourmet magazine announced today by publisher Conde Nast, that most-annoyingly named group of elitists the “foodies” are crying into their consommé. But, as someone a little more rough-hewn, I must admit to now fearing for the ultimate demise of my own preferred form of [...]
Indiana’s two best football teams have built-in advantages in that each gets to field an extra player. Notre Dame, a college power for the better part of a century, merely (or so it’s said) has God on its side. The Indianapolis Colts have an even greater asset: Peyton Manning, who [...]
Although I wouldn't be considered a fashionista, I've always been intrigued by fashion shows. Maybe because I participated in one while in junior high, where I modeled a cheesy white polyester two-piece suit with plastic gold buttons from the Mode O'Day in Arlington.
My first grown-up fashion shows were at' [...]
You had to be there, exactly 14 years ago today. To really understand how much this city responded when the Mariners made it into the playoffs for the first time in 1995, you had to have been here to feel the palpable shift after 18 years of bad baseball.
The Mariners’ [...]
With a nod to the reality-TV industry and the power (and low cost) of viral marketing, local credit union Verity is nearing the end of a month-long “contest” to pick a Mommy Blogger for the financial institution’s website. Votes are being collected online through this Sunday (October 4), and visitors [...]
The federal stimulus bill has had one notable effect in Washington. It’s revived the hopes of charter school advocates. In an email that went out September 28, long-time charter advocate Jim Spady has called for help in setting up a new organization, Kids First Washington, to lobby the legislature for [...]
A dedicated Mariners fan and long-ago sportswriter, I have over the past eight years done "looking-ahead" pieces at the beginning and end of each season. Here, with one week remaining in this season, is the end-of-2009 version.
General manager Jack Zduriencik and manager Don Wakamatsu confirmed the good impressions they made in [...]
Mayor Greg Nickels is moving ahead with his proposed ban of guns from parks facilities, including playgrounds, pools, community- and nature centers. The ban was inspired in part by an incident last year at Folklife.
The re-emergence of gang problems has also contributed to public concern, as have [...]
Not being able to sleep on the nine-hour flight from Atlanta to Santiago, I look up from the book I am staring at and observe that mine is the only above-head light aglow. I am in for an ordeal — a strange place in a foreign tongue — and I [...]
The Seattle Seahawks have endured a number of less-than-endearing nicknames. They were the “Hee-Hawks,” for example, when the young club was a perennial National Football League laughingstock. That’s why one would have imagined “Limeys” would have been the latest way to rename a team that, losing to Chicago at home [...]
Not being able to sleep on the nine-hour flight from Atlanta to Santiago, I look up from the book I am staring at and observe that mine is the only above-head light aglow. I am in for an ordeal — a strange place in a foreign tongue — and I [...]
Readers of alternative newsweeklies across the country have for years enjoyed the comic strip "This Modern World" by Tom Tomorrow. When I was at Seattle Weekly during the Bush years, we carried the strip and readers sent letters telling me that it kept them sane. No one is better [...]
Readers of alternative newsweeklies across the country have for years enjoyed the comic strip "This Modern World" by Tom Tomorrow. When I was at Seattle Weekly during the Bush years, we carried the strip and readers sent letters telling me that it kept them sane. No one is better [...]
In another sign of the tepid economy and of large-scale changes in the radio industry, Seattle’s classical music station KING FM laid off three staff members this week. Gone are three very familiar presences: midday host Steve Reeder, overnight and fill-in host (and former longtime KING program director) Peter Newman, [...]
Feliks Banel, Ted Van Dyk, Ann Bauer, Mike Henderson, Knute Berger, Sue Frause, Jean Godden, Steve Clifford, Matt Fikse, David Brewster, Chuck Wolfe, Johnathon Fitzpatrick, Judy Lightfoot, Monte Enbysk, Travis Hay, Daniel Jack Chasan, Kent Kammerer, Michele Matassa Flores, David Laskin, Spider Kedelsky, Mark Matassa, Bill Richards, Chuck Taylor
