One of the Seattle attorneys suing Apple and five big book publishers for e-book “price fixing” explains why he did it (without saying whether or not Amazon’s involved in his move):

The new system was clearly not helpful to consumers, as it meant that they could no longer shop for a bargain amongst retailers. Instead, prices at each retailer would be identical. Alongside the elimination of competition between retailers over price, the agency model allowed, we believe, a 30 to 50 percent increase in the price of the ebooks.

Each publisher’s decision to sign an agreement with Apple was not illegal by itself. What would be illegal, however, would be the coordination of five of the largest publishers joining forces to thwart price competition. Given the nearly simultaneous timing of the actions of these five publishers, and the fact that their actions coincided with the launch of the iPad, we believe there was coordination.

original mac screen fonts, from folklore.org

There’s a battle going on in the e-book field, one of the few media businesses that’s truly booming these days.

At stake: what these non-thing purchases will cost you.

In one corner: Amazon. The Seattle e-commerce king and Kindle e-book machine seller wants to set its own e-book prices (with most mass-market titles at $9.99), no matter what publishers want.

(Amazon also wants to eliminate the “hardcover window,” the early months of publication in which only the high-priced deluxe version of a book can be bought. Specifically, Amazon wants to sell e-books of a title the same week as that title’s dead-tree version first comes out.)

In the other corner: Five of America’s six biggest publishers (HarperCollins, Hachette, Macmillan, Penguin, Simon & Schuster), plus Apple (in a third corner?). The publishers have publicly proposed a different pricing structure, which they call “the agency model.” Under this scheme, publishers would set e-book retail prices. The e-book selling sites (Apple, Amazon, B&N, Kobo, etc.) would keep a 30 percent margin from this price.

Early last year, Macmillan threatened to withhold its titles from Amazon’s Kindle e-book platform until Amazon capitulated to the “agency model,” which it did; but only after Amazon threatened to withhold selling Macmillan’s physical books from the main Amazon site.

Now, a Seattle law firm has filed a class action suit in a California U.S. District Court. The suit alleges the five publishing giants and Apple have conspired to drive up e-book prices. The law firm names two individual consumers, in California and Mississippi, as the case’s official plaintiffs.

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With all this going on, William Skidelsky at the Guardian asks what’s the “true price” of a book as a written and edited document, rather than as a physical object.

Skidelsky quotes ex-Billboard editor Robert Levine, who’s written a forthcoming tract entitled Free Ride: How Digital Parasites are Destroying the Culture Business, and How the Culture Business Can Fight Back. Levine, as you’d guess, takes the side of the intellectual-property industry, including the book publishers.

Levine (as quoted by Skidelsky) states that it only costs $3.50 to “print and distribute” a hardcover book.

Thus, the argument goes, e-books should be just that much cheaper than physical books, no more.

However, it’s not that simple.

First of all, the whole pricing structure of physical books is about the design, manufacture, shipping, warehousing, and retailing of the object; including big margins to the retailers and wholesalers (who still sometimes have trouble keeping afloat). When all that’s reduced to the storage of some megabytes on a server, that whole pricing model goes away.

And much of the publisher’s share of a book’s price includes an allowance for the industry’s tremendous physical waste. If a copy shipped to a bookstore doesn’t sell, it gets sent back. All those copies are either re-shipped at clearance prices (more likely for coffee-table picture books) or destroyed. With e-books, none of that happens.

•

You will note that, aside from Levine, we haven’t mentioned authors.

What would an e-book pricing structure look like if it were based on the people who actually make what’s being bought?

Take the current royalties for a book’s authors and illustrators.

Then at least double them.

Not only do the creators deserve it, but such a step would acknowledge that, since e-books are cheaper to get out, there will be more titles out there scrambling for readers’ bucks, and hence each individual title might not sell as much.

Then add in a budget item for the work-for-hire participants in a book’s making—the editors and designers and cover artists and licensors of agency photographs. Again, they’d be higher than for traditional paper books, to make up for lower expected total sales.

There’s still a role in the e-book realm for what we call “publishers.” They put up the money. They arrange promotion and advertising. They put authors, artists, and editors together. In many cases, they organize the transmutation of a vague idea into a saleable product.

Once these parties all have their pieces of the pie set into a fixed wholesale price, e-book sellers could charge as much or as little as they think they can get away with.

•

That’s one potential e-book pricing model. There are others.

One is that of Take Control Books, for which I’ve worked in the past. They sell their e-books directly on their own site. Half the retail take, minus a cut for the company’s e-commerce provider, goes directly to the authors. (Take Control sells its e-books as .pdf files, which can be transferred with greater or lesser ease to all e-book reading devices.)

Another is self publishing, that past and present refuge of the artiste with no perceived commercial potential. Only in the e-book age, some authors are actually succeeding this way.

Earlier this year, bestselling thriller writer Barry Eisler said he was walking out of his “handshake deal” with St. Martin’s Press. For the time being, all books written by Eisler will be published by Eisler.

Of course, Eisler has an established “brand” for his works; much like Radiohead had when they released a download-only album. And Eisler has experience in the Silicon Valley startup world.

A more realistic role model would be that of Amanda Hocking. She’s young. She’s photogenic. She writes in a popular commercial-fiction genre. She’s sold a million e-books without a corporate backer (she’s got one now, though).

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The business side of book publishing, as I’ve carped here for years, has been a moribund, tradition-obsessed infrastructure of waste and lost opportunity.

E-books represent the biggest chance in decades (since the rise of the big-book bookstore chains) to fix this.

Let’s not blow it.

(Thanx and a hat tip to Michael Jacobs for suggesting added angles to this story.)

2005 fremont solstice parade goers at the lenin statue

• The Lenin statue in Fremont is privately owned, and is for sale. But nobody apparently wants to buy it.
• Minorities: Bellevue’s got a lot more of ’em these days, sez the Census. Seattle’s got a lot fewer.
• Art Thiel wants you to know the big Husky Stadium rebuild, to begin this winter, involves no taxpayer funds. Just private donations and bond issues to be repaid out of UW Athletics income.
• Ex-State Rep Brendan Williams wants Washington state’s progressives to “get some backbone” about preserving vital services in the state budget.
• Starbucks boss and Sonics seller Howard Schultz’s latest big idea: Big election-campaign donors like him should vow to boycott funding election campaigns. Of course, if Democratic donors like Schultz are the only ones doing the boycotting….
• There’s a plan to create a “Jimi Hendrix Park,” next to the African American Museum at the old Coleman School. It would be the fifth Hendrix memorial of one type or another (not counting the Experience Music Project, which parted ways with the Hendrix heirs during its development). Cobain still has just that one unofficial park bench in Viretta Park and a city-limits sign in Aberdeen.
• Rolling Stone put out a reader poll declaring the top punk acts of all time. The list put Green Day on top and included not a single female. FlavorWire has come to the side of justice with its own in-house listing of “15 Essential Women Punk Icons.” The NW’s own Kathleen Hanna, Beth Ditto, and Sleater-Kinney are on it, as is onetime Seattleite Courtney Love.
• Many, many indie-label CDs were in a warehouse that burned during the London lootings. Some labels might not survive the blow.
• Mike Elgan at Cult of Mac sez Apple’s invented all the big things it’s going to invent for a while. We’ve heard this one before.
• And for those of you heading back into the working life (you lucky stiffs, you), take heed Peter Toohey’s thoughts (partly inspired by the late David Foster Wallace) on “the thrill of boredom:”

Boredom should not be abused, exploited, ignored, sneered at, rejected or talked down to as a product of laziness or of an idle, uninventive and boring mind. It’s there to help, and its advice should be welcomed and acted upon.

illo from the 1962 world's fair guide book

• Knute Berger looks back at predictions for 21st century greater Seattle made during the 1962 World’s Fair. Surprisingly, population growth in the region is a bit lower than was then predicted. Still no flying cars or domed cities, though.
• The grownup Frances Bean Cobain has posed for a fashion shoot. All thin, dark haired, and attitude-y. But all those cigarettes? They’re not rebellious, just icky.
• Joni Balter, a member of the SeaTimes‘ “all taxes = bad” editorial board, surprisingly issues an essay decrying politicians who sign on to simplistic pledges, such as GOP operative Grover Norquist’s “no new taxes ever” pledge.
• Could the revised, Costco-invented, liquor privatization scheme actually increase state revenues? And, more importantly, would any extra revenues be eaten up by alcoholism-treatment costs and DWI prosecutions?
• Somebody’s prediction for where home prices will rise the most in the next year? Tacoma.
• If AT&T gets to take over T-Mobile USA, the latter’s 30,000 employees (including the 3,000 or so at its Bellevue national HQ) could be essentially done for.
• The state’s economy’s not getting any better any time soon.
• The plea-bargained “barefoot bandit” has a movie deal. All the proceeds will go to his crimes’ victims.
• A “revolutionary collective” has announced plans to protest Metro’s threatened service cuts by refusing to pay bus fares. Somehow I think this won’t help.
• Bert and Ernie are as (officially) non-gay as Laverne and Shirley.
• Standard & Poor’s and its fellow investment rating agencies have spent millions on lobbying to keep the financial markets unregulated. We all know how well that’s worked out.
• Bee Lavender at HipMama (the site based on the alt-culture parenting zine) has her own first person perspective on the London riots:

Many of the people out on the streets this week are usually invisible. They are part of an underclass, an underworld, where the rules are different and you have to take what you can to get through the day. Given the chance, many would in fact make something better out of their lives – but they don’t get the chance. What little equilibrium existed even a year ago has now vanished, and they are raging. Because they have no hope, no future, nowhere to go and nothing to do.

The Thursday Northwest-getaways tab was axed. It was another of those sections that existed only to sell ads, and which was utterly failing in that goal. Four tab pages of regional event listings were added to the Friday entertainment tab, and two pages of regional destination stories were added to the Sunday travel section.

Also, the Friday “Your” page in the regular paper (the last vestige of the daily “living” section) was axed.

This means 16 half pages and one full size page were reduced from the weekly page count; with four half pages and two full pages added. The net reduction is five full-page equivalents, from a SeaTimes that’s already been cut-crazed in the past three years.

The op-ed pages on Wednesday and Friday were axed, leaving a single opinion page Monday-Saturday.

Sunday sports was cut to eight pages plus ads. We’ll see if any pages get restored for college football season, traditionally the biggest time for Sunday sports coverage.

The Saturday “Weekend Preview Edition” of the Sunday paper is now a cutdown miniature, with all the ads (including the insert flyers) but less editorial (even canned wire copy). No local news content (not even the pre-written feature “cover stories”). Only four pages of sports copy (heavy on previews of Sunday’s and the following week’s events).

The SeaTimes is expanding in one department. It’s taking over the Everett Herald’s home delivery operation.

from thelmagazine.com

There’s bad news today for the book snobs out there.

(You know, the droning turned-up-nose guys who love to whine that Nobody Reads Anymore, except of course for themselves and their own pure little subculture.)

Turns out, according to a study co-sponsored by two industry groups, book sales are actually up over the past three years!

Yes, even during this current economic blah-blah-blah!

Ebook sales have particularly exploded.

But regular dead-tree volumes are also up; except for mass market paperbacks (perhaps the most vulnerable category to the ebook revolution).

Adult fiction sales rose 8.8 percent from early ’08 to late ’10. Also doing well, according to the NYT story about the study: “Juvenile books, which include the current young-adult craze for paranormal and dystopian fiction….” (Good news for people who love bad news, to quote a Modest Mouse CD.)

Oh, as for that other commercial communications medium? You know, the medium that the book snobs call their sworn enemy?

The AP headline says it all: “Pay TV industry loses record number of subscribers.”

•

Has the above inspired you to get with the program, hop on the bandwagon, follow the fad, and start buying some more books for your very own?

I have a great little starter number, just for you.

nalley's display at the puyallup fair (1948); from the tacoma public library

It’s the end of the (canning) line in Nalley Valley.

The 93-year-old south Tacoma food processing giant became a regional (and in some product lines, international) hit in potato chips and dips, pickles, pancake syrup, chili, mayonnaise, salad dressings, and countless other packaged-food products.

But the company was sold back in the ’60s, and resold several times since. Various managements sold or closed Nalley’s product lines over the years.

Finally, the New York equity group that now owns the brand has shut the last part of the plant, which made chili and canned soups.

The equity group, and its trademark licensees, promise to keep the Nalley’s brand alive, in the same way that there’s still a beer called Rainier (made at the Miller plant in L.A.).

But that’s not the same thing as actually being here, employing local workers, sourcing from local farmers.

(In the comments that follow the hereby-linked Seattle Times story, one commenter notes the current owner of the Nalley’s pickle line touts it as “The Taste of the Northwest,” even though the stuff’s now made in Iowa from cukes grown in India.)

The Seattle Times has affirmed something I’ve known personally for a while now.

The only jobs to be had in this town are for software programmers.

Can I learn to program at my stage of life?

And if so, any recommendations where/how?

And would it even be worth it?

I’d rather not go through a whole costly course of study, only to find the companies still want only to hire the young and/or already employed.

And I don’t want to study technologies that will cease to be in demand after I’ve started studying them.

• Our ol’ pal David Goldstein floats the idea that Metro Transit perhaps should be broken up, with Seattle resuming authority over in-city bus routes (including funding authority), intercity routes given over to Sound Transit, and King County keeping the rest of the system. (Seattle ran its own bus routes before Metro was formed in the early 1970s.)
• Meanwhile, Jason Kambitsis at Wired.com believes transit is a civil rights issue. It allows lower-income people to get to work and other places without the relative huge expense of car ownership.
• Another bicyclist was struck by another hit-and-run driver in Seattle. Fortunately, this victim will live.
• In what might be a grandstanding move but is still welcome, state Attorney General (and gubernatorial candidate) Rob McKenna is lashing out about what he calls Bank of America’s shoddy foreclosure practices…
• …and the Washington Mutual execs who steered the state’s last homegrown big bank into the heart of the mortgage-bubble disaster won’t be prosecuted.
• The Mariners have finally gotten rid of designated hitter Jack Cust, whose very name invokes what M’s fans have done a lot of this year.
• The young City of SeaTac finally got its first big protest march (by and for hotel workers).
• Would the Midwestern funny-money fiddlers who now run Boeing really ruin the company’s whole quality reputation and value chain just to stick it to Wash. state? Maybe.
• When inappropriate quasi-racist comments about Obama will be made, Fox News will make them.
• Another slice of the media biz that’s in apparently inexorable fiscal decline: cable porn. The Gawker.com story about this, naturally, can’t stop repeating the word “shrinkage.”
• To end on a fun note, here are some cool pictures of old cassette tapes.

pride parade viewers at the big popsicle

(A relatively long edition this time, bear with.)

• So, who’s responsible for the giant Popsicle art piece (an instant popular hit!) at Martin Selig’s Fourth and Blanchard Building? It’s Mrs. Selig.
• Architecture critic Lawrence W. Cheek sees the Amazon.com campus in South Lake Union as “sleek, stiff, anonymous modern boxes, impeccably executed, with rarely a whiff of whimsy or personality.”
• Wright Runstad, the real estate developer who’s got the lease on most of the old Beacon Hill hospital building (where Amazon.com was headquartered until recently) have proposed a deal with King County. The county would move its juvie court and jail up the hill (paying rent to WR), while selling WR the current juvie campus south of Seattle U (nine eminently developable acres).
• UW computer science researchers are trying to write an algorithm to generate “that’s what she said” jokes.
• Some anonymous person posted crude web-animations snarking about fictionalized versions of Renton police personnel. Renton police want to find and jail whoever did it; thus proving themselves eminently worthy of such ridicule.
• Without illegal immigrants, say buh-bye to Wash. state agriculture.
• Local composer David Hahn pleas for an end to the decimation of arts funding.
• Family and friends of the slain native carver John T. Williams have finished a memorial totem pole. The 32-foot carving is supposed to be installed in Seattle Center. Sometime.
• White artists in South Africa are now depicting themselves as outsiders.
• Bad Ads #1: When fashion magazines and their advertisers depict 10-12 year old girls looking “sexy,” are they really promoting anorexia?
• Bad Ads #2: Did the London Olympics promoters who used the Clash’s “London Calling” in a commercial even listen to the song first?
• Do violent deaths really rise during Republican presidencies? One author claims so.
• Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign has a new advisor. It’s Robert Bork, the onetime Supreme Court nominee. Bork, you might recall, hates porn, birth control, feminism, the Civil Rights Act, and free speech. Romney, you might recall, is billing himself as the sane alternative to the other Republicans who want to be President.
• Economist Umair Haque, whom I’ll say more about next week in this space, believes declining consumer spending isn’t part of the problem, it’s part of the solution.
• For two consecutive years, a suburban Minnesota high school’s idea of homecoming-week fun was to have white kids dressing up like stereotypes of black kids. Somebody finally sued.
• There’s another political move to negate your online rights. As usual, the excuse is “protecting children.”
• Contrary to prior announcements, Jerry Lewis will not make a cameo final appearance at this year’s muscular dystrophy telethon (itself no longer a true telethon, just a really long special). Perhaps that means the show can finally stop depicting “Jerry’s Kids” as pitiful waif victims, and instead depict ordinary, fully extant boys and girls (and men and women) who simply have a medical condition.

bachmann family values?

• No, Michele Bachmann, slaves did not have stable marriages and families. Not when spouses could be re-sold to separate masters or be used as involuntary sex toys.
• Today’s anti-deep-bore-tunnel sermon comes to you in the form of cute CGI cartoon characters with synthesized voices.
• As for the tunnel project we like, the Capitol Hill light-rail tunnel is being dug by a 21-foot-wide boring machine nicknamed “Brenda.” Make your own 90210 jokes here.
• Painting murals on street surfaces—do they reduce traffic speeds, or encourage dangerous games of pedestrian hopscotch?
• The Midwestern union buster wannabes who now run Boeing are being very secretive in their “southern strategy.”
• Admitting your addiction to Facebook is the first step toward regaining control of your life. Yes, I found this link from Facebook.
• Woke up, it was a Chelsea mornin’ and the first thing that I heard was the historic hipster hotel’s been sold to speculators who want to turn it into rich folks’ residences.
• Post-made-up-“crisis” updates: Joe Biden allegedly called Congressional Republicans “terrorists.” Less famous commenters say the GOPpers are waging a “war on America” and claim they “fit the profile of the classic abuser.” Another e-pundit wonders whether the Bushies deliberately left the nation incurably “bankrupt, corrupt, ungovernable.”
• On a lighter note, here’s some fun stuff found at Grocery Outlet.

• Legendary skyjacker D.B. Cooper might have finally been tracked down. Dead, of course. (As all real fans of the legend know, the alias he really gave to Northwest Airlines was “Dan Cooper.” Turns out there had been a French comic book hero of that name.)
• Stuck for one more summer month with bored, pouting offspring (of the fem. variety)? Send ’em to the new American Girl doll store in Alderwood Mall. (I personally like that the American Girl brand/phenomenon teaches the history of everyday life, which is just as important as the history of politicians and generals if not more so.)
• AP headline: “Woman’s Facebook breakup lawsuit against Kennewick man dismissed.” No, not that Kennewick Man.
• As anti-tunnel advocates held a march on City Hall Monday, TheSunBreak.com dissected a couple of Seattle Times pro-highway-construction editorials. The editorials were published in 1967. The highway they were supporting was the R.H. Thompson Expressway, which would have basically eliminated much of the Central District and obliterated much of the Arboretum. The Arboretum’s famous “ramps to nowhere” were built to connect State Route 520 to the Thompson, which was thankfully rejected by voters who’d rejected the Times’ arguments—arguments mightily similar to the paper’s pro-tunnel arguments these days.
• In made-up-national-crisis news, Keith Olbermann angrily lashes back on the debt deal, calling for a mass movement bent on “taking back governance from politicians.”
• To the contrary, here are two web-based pundits who insist Obama actually won this one. Stacie Borrello insists that “Obama and the Dems are the ones who outplayed the GOP,” leaving House Republicans “trying to save face.” And Spandan Chakrabarti (aka “Deaniac83”) claims that (contrary to what relative know-nothings like Paul Krugman might claim)…

Barack Obama ate John Boehner’s lunch, and then he turned Boehner out to go preach to his conservative colleagues that this eating of the lunch by Obama is actually politically good for them.

sorry, maude, you didn't make the list

• Julianne Escobedo Shepherd offers a list of 10 (American, prime time) “TV shows that changed the world.” It includes some of the usual suspects (Ellen, Mary Tyler Moore, the original Star Trek) but leaves out so many other possibilities. Where’s Yogi and Boo Boo in the same bed all winter, or all the early variety shows with interracial love-song duets?
• Seattle PostGlobe, the spunky li’l local news and arts site started by ex P-I reporter Kery Murakami (and for which I posted a couple of pieces), is closing up shop after two years and change. With Murakami gone to Long Island, NY and many other original volunteer contributors off in other jobs (or other careers), the site had mainly become a spot for Bill White’s film reviews. Without the funding to maintain the site’s operation, let alone to build it into a stronger endeavor, its current boss (and cofounder) Sally Deneen is pulling the plug. She’s keeping it up in archival form.
• In other local media news, technical workers at KIRO-TV have been at a labor impasse for some15 months now. The IBEW Local 46 claims they’re just trying to preserve contractual language “that respects their individual and collective rights that are afforded to them under federal law.”
• Copper thieves have no respect for anyone or anything. Not even for the local branch of Gilda’s Club. That’s the drop-in cancer support center, named after Gilda Radner and housed in that fake Monticello office building at Broadway and East Union.
• The bicyclist struck by a hit-and-run SUV Thursday? He was a photographer and office worker for an international health agency. And how he’s dead.
• Wherever there’s a business with a predominantly male clientele, there’s somebody trying to attract female customers. The latest result comes from the UK branch of Molson Coors (you did know those beer companies had merged years ago, right?). They’re test marketing a pink beer for women. Even stranger: It’s called “Animée.” Which begs the question, would Sailor Moon drink it? How about the Ghost in the Shell?
• Lee Fang sees a cartel of “shadowy right wing front groups” spending lotsa bucks to get Congress obsessed with “the deficit” (i.e., with dismantling anything government does to help non-billionaires) instead of the economy. I don’t think the drive is all that shadowy. These outfits, their funding sources, and their biases are well known and well documented—and still scary.
• Dan Balz sees today’s Republicans as being at war against Democrats, against the middle class, against women, against sanity, and now against one another.
• Remember: Tonight (Saturday the 30th) is the annual Seafair Torchlight Parade bisecting Belltown and downtown along Fourth Avenue. This year’s grand marshal is smaller-than-he-used-to-be TV personality and Sounders FC spokesmodel Drew Carey. (The organizers tried to get someone else for the role, but they bid over the actual retail price.)

Thursday was “Last Thursday” at the beloved 619 Western art studios. This low-key ending came after 30 years of magic and memories (including two events curated by this web-correspondent), and about a year of wrangling with the city and the state. (The latter wants to drill its viaduct replacement tunnel under the building, and claims the 1910 warehouse structure’s too unsound, in its current condition, to withstand being dug under.)

The 100-some tenants in the building’s six floors thought they had an agreement to get out of the building by next February, while the city offered relocation assistance. Any hope of actually preserving 619 for artists, during or after any rehab, seemed to dissolve away during these negotiations.

Then, earlier this month, came the surprise. The city decided the whole place was just too unsafe even for short-term occupancy. Everybody had to be out by October 1. Public events in the building were banned effective Aug. 1.

One final “First Thursday” was hastily scheduled, retitled “Last Thursday.”

One last chance to ride Seattle’s third coolest elevator.

One last chance to pay respects to the memory of Su Job, the building’s heart and soul for so many years.

One last chance to admire the familiar rickety stairwells.

One last chance to admire, and buy, locally-produced art in the corridors and the studios. (Only some of the building’s spaces were open this final night. Many tenants were already packed or packing up.)

Yes, 619’s got structural damage.

Yes, it needs shoring up, even if the tunnel project’s stopped.

And maybe its occupants would have to split the premises during a rehab, if not sooner.

But it still didn’t have to go down like this.

And I still want the place preserved, as an artist space.

(Some artists will sell their wares outside 619 next First Thursday, Aug. 4. That same evening, a tribute show to the building, Works of History: 30 Years of Anarchy, opens at Trabant Coffee, 602 2nd Ave.)

menu screen from 'mickey, donald, goofy: the three musketeers'

• We’ve just gotten over the official end of VHS a couple years ago, when now some are predicting the DVD’s similar fate. Sure, online streaming is cool if you have the bandwidth and can stand the re-buffering pauses at inopportune moments. But what about the bonus features? I’ll say it again: what about the bonus features? I want my bonus features, dammit!
• Our long local nightmare is over. What did it take to get the Mariners to actually win a baseball game after three ghastly, fallow weeks? Perhaps it was the sudden, tragic passing of one of the team’s charter employees (and best loved stadium figures), Rick the Peanut Guy.
• The city’s got a new Transit Master Plan. It identifies corridors that could use some transpo beefing up. One of them is Ballard (where, if you recall, the Monorail Project was to have gone). Now the city thinks it’d be a nice place for a streetcar (which, unlike a monorail, will be subject to the same traffic jams as cars). (BTW, this wish list is irrelevant to the more vital task, that of preserving what transit options we’ve got now from budgetary decimation.)
• On the national front, Jim Hightower pleads for any national politician to pay attention to working people instead of partisan idiocy; while Earl Ofari Hutchinson explains why Obama can’t take the big unilateral steps on the economy that FDR took. And Andrew Sullivan calls today’s GOP “not conservatives but anarchists,” obsessed only with destroying the Obama presidency even if the nation’s destroyed along with it.
• With its never-say-die attitude toward expanding its range of market segments, Costco’s re-formulated initiative to privatize liquor sales has qualified for the November ballot.
• And remember, tonight’s “Last Thursday,” the final public event in the prematurely condemned 619 Western artist studios.