I TRY NOT TO BE BLUNT about instructing my readers’ behavior (I know, I know, it ends up occurring all the time anyway).

But at least this time I know in advance I’m doing it. I’m giving my election 2000 recommendations. (Our out-of-state readers may choose to skip the rest of today’s piece and instead wander the archives.)

We have to wait until next year to dump Mayor Schell and City Attorney Sidran, but there’s still plenty of dorks needing removal from, or prevention from taking, office this time:

GOVERNOR: John Carlson does not deserve to even lose by a small margin, but to be thoroughly repudiated. Sure he’s advertising himself as a nice family guy for Bellevue-moderate consumption; but that’s as phony as the 1968 “New Nixon” image. Gary Locke has done virtually nothing in office except help promote corporate welfare; but Carlson, particularly if he got a Republican legislature, would make our tax system as regressive as he could, allow as much sprawl and clearcutting as he could, redefine the nonviolent mentally ill as criminals, and accellerate the phenomenon of government-by-the-highest-bidder.

INITIATIVE 745: We need more public transit, not none. John Carlson’s pal Tim “Permanent Offense” Eyman’s 745 would essentially kill almost all transit funding in Washington and shunt the money into more roads (i.e., more suburban sprawl).

INITIATIVE 53 (Seattle voters only): We need more public transit (see above), but it should be of a kind that people would want to ride. Everybody wants a citywide monorail, except the bureaucrats and the rail-construction lobbyists. It’s time to take our transportation future back from the know-nothing “experts.”

INITIATIVE 722: Tim Eyman’s earlier “Offense,” Initiative 695, started the anti-transit bulldozer his new 745 hopes to continue. Buried in the 745 hoopla, 722 would impose overly strict and arbitrary restrictions on state property taxes; essentially forcing the Legislature to gut education and social programs for the relief of upper-caste land owners. Yet another hate-talk-radio scheme that sounds really simple and does a lot of damage.

SCHOOLS INITIATIVES: Vote for Initiatives 728 (closing a loophole in a previous anti-funding measure and giving public schools more money) and 732 (making teachers’ pay slightly less abhorrently low). I’m a bit more hesitant about Initiative 729, which would set up publicly-funded but semi-autonomous “charter schools;” but am not wholly opposed to its basic concept.

U.S. SENATOR: Fish-stick heir Slade Gorton began his political career as one of ex-Gov. Dan Evans’s progressive Republicans; then followed the money to become a quintessential corporate-right hypocrite. He loves the military-industrial complex, the prison-industrial complex, big oil companies, big drug companies, big timber companies, and a certain big software company. He hates anyone and anything that stands in his friends’ money-grubbing way (native rights, affordable health care, environmental protection, antitrust, etc.).

PRESIDENT: Thus far, most of these have been “vote-against” recommendations. But in the Big Race, there’s one guy who promotes himself as someone prog-minded souls can actually vote for. The corporate Democrats have tried to quash any such outpouring of positive hoopla for Ralph Nader; not by directly challenging his platform (has any candidate this controversial been met with such little argumentative opposition?) but by invoking the old “spoiler” argument.

I don’t agree with everything Nader propagates. (He goes too far in some places, not enough in some others.) But he’s done a miraculous job of organizing the left’s usual grab-bag of anger-inducing issues into at least a semi-coherent plan of action.

Still, the “spoiler” argument looms. Both Gore and Bush are tools of big business; their biggest differences are primarily on policies on which the business lobby has little or no concern (abortion) or on which different moneyed interests have different views (HMOs vs. lawyers).

George Bush fils is an unintellectual but affable player in the glad-handing, cash-controlled milieu of Texas politics. He has few strong rabid-right convictions himself; but, given a rabid-right Republican Congress to curry favor with, I suspect he indeed would go along with whatever backwards social legislation or anti-freedom Supreme Court appointments the Trent Lotts and Dick Armeys suggest.

Therefore, if at the last hour of voting it seems like this state might make a difference between the Big Two, I’ll mark it for Al Gore fils. Not reluctantly, but strategically.

TOMORROW: Should we pity the San Franciscans yet?

ELSEWHERE:

• As originally thought up in Olympia, the term “Riot Grrrl” meant someone who, among other things, despised commercial women’s magazines and their obsession with beauty tips. Today, Borders Books uses the rubric “Grrrl Talk” to, well, sell beauty-tip books….