…still hasn’t flown yet, and company executives are already hinting at another round of job-blackmail demands for whatever plane will follow it.

Leno got it all wrong. The line should be, “It’s MONDAY, time for NON-HEADLINES!” Monday morning newspapers’ “top” stories tend to be feature-y or analytical or, in the case of the Venus Velasquez DUI arrest, more than a week old.

Still, there are a few actual items of interest out there.

Turns out, for one thing, that the Coolest Adult any Seattleite of a certain age ever knew, J.P. Patches, has cancer, but still keeps up a rigorous schedule of personal appearances. The Times’s picture showed the legendary local TV funnyman looking more ilke one of Red Skelton’s sad-clown paintings. Alas.

Let’s figure this one out: The Bellinghamsters at Western Washington U. told a male ex-student he couldn’t sell Women of Western swimsuit calendars on campus, because they were allegedly “demeaning to women.” Four years before, the same administration allowed a student organization to screen erotic art movies under the series title Pornfest.

A good student of semiotics would parse her/his way to a consistent line straddling both decisions–we want to encourage students to do it, not just sit around and look in the manner of passive consumers; or, perhaps, a swimsuit calendar represents an awkward intersection of sexuality and fashion, while porn offers a more directly visceral experience and is therefore more subversive of the dominant paradigm.

We must bid a fond adieu this morning to Porter Wagoner, your quintessential Nashville pop star. Besides his own dozens of hits (my favorite: “The Rubber Room”), he had a modest little syndicated TV series for 21 years. The Porter Wagoner Show was a deceptively plain affair, designed to mimic Wagoner’s touring show. Some patter, a baggy-pants comedian, some solo songs, one instrumental number, and a couple numbers by the band’s current “girl singer.” The second woman to fill the latter role was Dolly Parton, with whom Wagoner co-wrote and co-recorded many tracks between 1967 and 1975, when she went solo.

Puget Sound Energy is being sold to Australian and Canadian investors, who will take the state’s largest private utility “private.” That is, no more stock trading; and therefore no pesky SEC reports to file about the company’s finances.

The Puget Sound Light, Traction and Power Company was Seattle’s original electric company, and also its first operator of electrified streetcars. Even after the formation of the municipally-owned Seattle City Light, Puget Power still ran its parallel, competitive electric lines until the 1950s. (The last vestige of Puget Power’s in-city operation is now the independent Seattle Steam, providing competitive electric service to a wide swath of downtown.)

Further public-power initiatives in Tacoma and Snohomish County left Puget Power with a diminished operating turf that happened to be in the path of suburban sprawl. That territory included Snoqualmie, where the company had already dammed Snoqualmie Falls and built what’s now the Salish Lodge.

In the 1990s Puget Power merged with Washington Energy, formerly Washington Natural Gas, formerly Washington Gas Company (or “GASCO”). That company had run a huge smoke-belching coal-fired gasification plant for almost half a century. The plant was rendered obsolete when natural gas pipelines reached here; it eventually became Gas Works Park. For decades after that, the gas company’s most famous landmark was the giant revolving neon sign on its office roof, the Blue Flame (or, in later street jargon, the “blue vagina”).

In recent years, Puget Sound Energy has become under fire for not getting the power back on after windstorms as quickly as Seattle City Light and Tacoma Public Utilities. It’s not all the company’s operating fault. Its service area includes a lot of rural and exurban territories, still serviced by overhead wiring. Still, the company promised last week that the new owners would pour cash in to help modernize its network. Weezell see.

And, oh yeah, the Boston Red Sox effortlessly swept the World Series.

…Microsoft/Facebook minority-stake acquisition thang? Paul Andrews sez you shouldn’t estimate Facebook’s total value based on what MS paid for a piece of it.

A P-I editorial claims we might just as well forget about preserving industrial lands in Seattle, and let the “free” market determine the highest-‘n-best use for the city’s commercial real estate. High-rise, high-price housing, big-box retail, office parks–bring ’em on. Manufacturing, shipping, distribution–quaint, but “so last century.”

Our comment on their comment: Trade is never really unencumbered. There’s always governments, cartels, and other movers-‘n-shakers setting directions.

In Seattle, and in the U.S., the realm of stuff-making has been out of favor among these direction-setters. (Exceptions: the sub-realms of making prescription drugs, weapons systems, and fossil fuel products.)

We have an opportunity to set ourselves some different priorities.

We can say that stuff-making is worth preserving.

We can work to keep living-wage jobs in the city.

Or we can just let the developers and their wholly-owned politicians do any darned thing they want.

Third party magazine-subscription sales plans can be fraudulant.

A legendary storehouse of fabulous cheap wonders, the Boeing Surplus store in glorious Kent, is closing in December.

Boeing will still sell off stuff it no longer wants (hardware, upholstery, office furnishings, computers, power tools, obscure measuring instruments), but it’ll sell it all online. Where’s the adventure in that?

As you might expect for a place with so many engineering nerds among its regular customers, a “Save Boeing Surplus” web site is already up n’ running.

…just how “progressive” a left-of-center web site can be if said site is turning a profit but not paying its writers.

Here are some beautiful, haunting photos of toy factories in China. The series oscillates between three extremes: The official “fun” expressed in the products themselves, the regimented factory atmosphere, and the close-up portraits of individual humans (mostly female) on the production lines.

…a Courtney Love-branded perfume? Even she’s not so sure.

…may still tout the notion that our local real estate biz isn’t crashing at all, not really, at least not like some other places.

That rosy perspective hasn’t stopped Washington Mutual’s CEO from warning the national housing market could be heading for a “near-perfect storm.”

Finally, after decades of failed attempts and almost-but-not-quites, there will be a real supermarket in downtown Seattle.

It’ll be an IGA franchise in the lower level of the old Kress variety store at Third and Pike. Vanishing Seattle readers have seen a lovely pic of the soda fountain counter that had been there.

There are now more than 18,000 residents in greater downtown, including more than 10,000 in Belltown/Denny Regrade. But we’ve had to either attain sustenance at convenience stores, deli-marts, the individual small merchants of the Pike Place Market, or out of the neighborhood (lower Queen Anne, Broadway, the International District, or now the Whole Foods at Denny and Westlake).

I love Pike Place, but it ain’t exactly one-stop shopping, and it’s bigger on produce and meat than on packaged goods.

Whole Foods is OK if you shop around for bargains, but it’s not quite an everyday supplier of staples for us non-zillionaires.

Metropolitan Market, Uwajimaya, the Tribeca Building Safeway, and the Uptown QFC aren’t really our ‘hood; going there’s a deliberate shopping adventure, not a quick supply run.

Then there’s the online-ordering-and-delivery solution, available via Safeway, Albertsons, and promised soon from Amazon. That also has its downside–you’ve gotta order a lot to avoid a delivery charge, and you’ve gotta be home during the multi-hour “delivery window.”

So this is a great step forward for those of us who live downtown (and for the 160,000 or so who work or visit downtown each weekday).

The store is set to open in February. I can hardly wait.

One mistake in the P-I story about this: There never was a QFC at “811 Pike Street.” That was a misprint in the Polk City Directory; a QFC was, and is, at 811 East Pike Street.

There were smallish A&P (on Second near James) and Tradewell (at the current Fourth & Pike Rite Aid site) stores in past decades. And there was the Security Public Market in the current Bed Bath & Beyond space at Third and Virginia; like Pike Place, that was a sort of grocery mall in which each department was individually owned and operated.

Mayor Nickels now wants to ensure that Seattle “industrial” areas remain preserved for industry, after previously appearing to support condo/offices/retail development on every tract of land not reserved for single-family homes.

Let’s hope the scheme succeeds. We could use living-wage jobs. And as a community we need the connection to physical-level reality we get when more of us are involved in making physical, tangible things. This is especially vital as more and more of America’s stuff-making capacity is transferred to low-wage countries.

Let’s just stay vigilant about the definition of zoning-official “industrial” activity.

Software offices are not industrial.

Biotech offices are not industrial.

(And for that matter, architectural offices are not “artist spaces.”)

Today’s piece is long and goes all over the place. Consider yourselves warned.

Steven Brant is one of the many commentators who’ve noted the dangerous link between the Bushies’ I-can-do-any-goddamn-thing-I-want sense of privilege and the corporate-motivation side of new age create-your-own-reality philosophy, as particularly realized in the soon-to-end reign of Alberto Gonzales–a tenure which fellow pundit Greg Palast calls “Wrong and Illegal and Unethical.”

By Brant’s line of reasoning, the right-wing sleaze machine has spent the past seven years determined that it can get everything it wants just by believing in it really hard (and, of course, by hustling and dirty tricks and corruption and torture and favors etc.); but cruel reality is increasingly catching up with their fantasies.

I’m getting less sure about this interpretation.

First of all, the GOPpers have remained “successful” at their prime goals–to concentrate wealth upward, to swap favors with the insurance, drug, oil, and weapons industries (even at the expense of the economy as a whole), to turn the entire federal government (with the recent exception of Congress) into an operating subsidiary of the Republican campaign operation, to rig the election process by hook or by crook, to reward friends and punish enemies, to promote a more authoritarian society at home and imperial ventures abroad.

The administration’s simply failed at tasks to which its devotions are shallower–democracy, security, justice, public health, education, economic prosperity beyond the ruling class, and the whole basic spectrum of good-guy goals America used to claim to care about.

But that leads to another question. If us “reality based” progressives are gonna pooh-pooh the right’s positive-thinking shtick, how do we account for the right’s success at so many of its real goals–particularly the goal of persuading and keeping loyal dittohead voters?

This is where a few recent books come in.

The first is Drew Westen’s The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation.

Westen (no relation to ABC News execs Av and David Westin, or to Westin Hotels) argues that the right’s policies may have had a near-totally negative impact on the body politic’s health, but its public messages have been cleverly crafted for optimal emotional impact. Those emotions could be sunny, or fearful, or bigoted, depending on the particular audience “buttons” needing to be pushed; but they were always effectively presented.

Us left-O-centers, in contrast, have had a lousy rep for left-brain, policy-wonk talk that resonates with nobody except ourselves; or for downer everything’s-hopeless cynicism; or for mealy-mouthed, middle-of-the-road wussiness.

To change this sorry state-O-affairs, Westen sez Dems have to show up with some emotionally compelling narratives of their own, and to fearlessly shout ’em out.

This notion coincides with the premise of Chip and Dan Heath’s new marketing guidebook, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.

The Heath brothers seldom mention politics in their book, save for lauding JFK’s “Man on the Moon” speech. Their main target is the business person looking for a way to connect with potential customers.

But their premise, if it works to sell shoes and burgers, would also work to sell policies and politicians.

That premise: Ideas that spread, that “hit” with audiences, all employ six key ingredients: “simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotions, and stories,” in various amounts.

Let’s explore how these principles might work in a marketing drive whose “product” is progressive-Dem candidates for public office:

• 
  Simplicity: Have the wonky details of our plans available online and in print. But have clear, memorable goals and promises in front of them. Defuse the Mideast powder keg. Get our troops home safe n’ sound. Health care for all. Back to balanced budgets.
• 
  Unexpectedness: Voters and pundits may expect another play-it-safe, make-no-waves Dem campaign, vetted by consultants and triangulated for minimum offensiveness. Let’s pleasantly shock ’em with some real passion and guts.
• 
  Concreteness: A budget-deficit cut by X each year. A Medicare-like health card in every wallet. A proud homecoming for our sons n’ daughters from Iraq.
• 
  Credibility: Have the wonk-data ready. But also show the resolve to get these policies up and running.
• 
  Emotions: Where there was fear, there will be hope. Where there was hatred, there will be compassion. Where there was blind ambition, there will be cooperation. Where there was spoiled privilege, there will be responsibility.
• 
  Stories: Life’s been tough. Ordinary folks struggled to get by; while the few at the top kept acting greedier and stupider. A gang of thieves has ripped up the Constitution as well as the social fabric.But, together, we can turn it around. America can mean something again.

P.S.: Yesterday’s electronic town hall by progressive heroine and Congressional candidate Darcy Burner had a few technical glitches (the video stream went down a couple of times). But it was a fundraising smash. Burner raised over $100,000 from nearly 3,000 contributors before and during the event, which got great write-ups on the national political blogs.

I first visited the Pike Place Market in 1975. More than three years after city residents voted to “Save the Market,” the big renovation/restoration was still underway. Much of the South Arcade was boarded up, with “artistic” grafitti and murals painted on the plywood barriers. One board bore the simple message: DON’T FIX IT UP TOO MUCH–SAVE THE MARKET.

The Market voters had “saved” was a homey, funky, rundown warren of stands and shops, a place of proletarian dreams and honest hard work. The fixed-up Market maintained this look, even as the surrounding First Avenue sleaze district shrank.

As the years passed, it became a mecca for civic self-congratulation. More merchants geared themselves to tourists, using such gimmicks as the infamous fish throwers. Luxury car dealerships shot magazine ads along Pike Place (“No Ordinary Supermarket, No Ordinary Car”).

New York financiers, supposedly “silent” investors in the Market’s real estate, suddenly claimed ownership. The city fought ’em and won. The city argued the financiers intended to “fix it up too much,” destroying the Market’s soul for the sake of upscale retail revenues.
Now, it seems the city bureaucrats running the Market might just be “fixing it up too much” on their own. Some of the powers-that-be want to promote the place as the ultimate high-end retail destination for the condo crowd.

I say the Market’s role as “the soul of Seattle” is more vital than competing against Whole Foods.

Sure, sell fancy stuff. But still sell the basics. Make the place a refuge for products downtown people need but high-end retail doesn’t offer.

And Keep It Funky, God.

…(or rather, a streaming-content company working with AT&T’s sponsorship) deliberately censor Eddie Vedder leading an anti-Bush chant during a live Lollapalooza webcast?

And in a related question, are there really still Lollapalooza concerts?

Yes to both questions.

But the company insists the sound-silencing was a mistake done by an overzealous “content monitor” employee at the content contractor.

It couldn’t have happened at a better time for critics of the company now known as AT&T. (You’ll recall, won’t you, that today’s AT&T is really Southwestern Bell Corp., one of the “Baby Bell” spinoffs of the original AT&T, which recently acquired the name and other remnants of its former parent.)

The company’s online critics have chided it for cooperating with the Bushies’ warrentless wiretap schemes, and for advocating so-called “throttled” broadband services (in which Internet service providers such as itself could speed up or slow down consumers’ connections to specific Web sites), and for cooperating too closely with MPAA/RIAA file-sharing crackdowns.

It’s not as if AT&T were censoring a site it wasn’t directly sponsoring.

It’s not as if you couldn’t get the deleted words from other sources. (Pearl Jam has put up the whole unbleeped sequence on its own site.)

And it’s not as if you can’t find anti-Bush messages online from many other sources.

Still, it ain’t good PR for a company trying to prove its trustworthiness (whilst basking in its share of the iPhone hype).