• The LGBT Community Center, which just got its own Capitol Hill building a couple years back, is now in fiscal trouble. It may close by month’s end. Does cultural acceptance of other sexual preferences necessarily lead to assimilation, and in turn to the death of niche-subculture institutions?
• Is Paul Allen getting a “sweetheart deal” from the City in regards to his South Lake Union development projects? Many have rumored such allegations, and now City Councilmember Peter Steinbrueck is vocalizing ’em.
• No, Snohomish cops, UW profs taking industrial-art photographs are not terrotists.
• Microsoft’s shut down a holiday greetings Web page that featured a sometimes foul-mouthed Santa.
• In decades past, private, for-profit lending libraries offered books for rent, sometimes in genres or to audience niches public libraries wouldn’t or couldn’t fully serve. Now, some web entrepreneurs want to bring back the concept, in the form of “a Netflix for books.”
• And, yep, there’s still lotsa flood damage and closed roads and highways throughout Western Washington.

• PCC groceries ban all products containing high fructose corn syrup. Remember: When mainstream soda pop is outlawed, only outlaws will Do the Dew.
• The biggest class action lawsuit in Wash. state history’s underway. The class of plaintiffs: Every Washingtonian who’s ever worked for Wal-Mart.
• Those Kansas “Christians” harassing the families of dead gay soldiers at funerals showed up in Port Orchard, along with the expected counter-protesters.
• The state Dept. of Ecology claims stormwater drainage from parking lots, driveways, and roads sends more than six million gallons of petroleum into Puget Sound every year. That’s about half the output of the Exxon Valdez disaster, a drop at a time.
• Today’s dentist-caught-abusing-sedated-female-patients story comes to you from Shoreline.
• Beware of “sham recyclers,” outfits that charge you to take your stuff away and then just dump it in landfills.

• The end of the ride may finally be in sight for the delightfully seedy/carny Seattle Center Fun Forest. The amusement park’s lessee/operators never recovered from losing a big chunk of their space to the Experience Music Project. They’re way behind on their rent to the City. Everybody in city and county officialdom wants the arcades and rides outta there. They’d like to replace it all with something more befitting of New Seattle world-class-osity, such as a big lawn peppered with public art, or a miniature “real” forest. Will nobody step forward in defense of this business-for-pleasure, this bastion of pre-Space Mountain carnivality?
• Glammie-gate’s repercussions continue. Gay Bingo’s new boss told its beloved host, the foul-mouthed drag performer Glamazonia, to clean up her act or be gone. As you might expect, she didn’t go away quietly.And again this year, the Sheraton’s got a huge display of gingerbread structures to benefit, of all causes, the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation.

…some less than flattering words about the church that’s moving into Belltown’s Tabella nightclub space. Essentially, Lanham accuses the church and its leader of preaching hatred, homophobia, and misogyny under the guise of a youth-understanding hipster.

Gay, piercing fan, cock ring wearer.

…sets in, the remaining loyal Bushbots get more transparent about their real beliefs and goals. Today’s lesson: A Wall St. Journal oped proposing that the Constitution actually allows Presidents to assume dictatorial powers, and that Presidents should assume such powers when they see fit to do so.

The author of this particular piece is no mere talk-radio goon. Harvard prof Harvey Mansfield, as profiled by Glenn Greenwald, is one of Leo Strauss’s U. of Chicago ideologues, an outspoken misogynist and homophobe, and a fawning admirer of Machiavelli. He articulately wraps his arguments in the fanciest of rhetorical flourishes. He creates structured arguments that follow from their initial premises, with all the skill of a great debater.

He is also full of shit.

Greenwald claims Mansfield’s particular slickly-packaged shit accurately expresses what the Bush machine really believes. I’m not so sure. To ascribe Mansfield’s forensic cleverness to the likes of Cheney and Rove, let alone the Chimp himself, is to imply that they (or their inner circle) are capable of logical processing at a sufficient level.

More likely, the central Bushbots have simply acted on lizard-brain tyrannical pasison. This leaves it to the peripheral Bushbots such as Mansfield to invent a reasoning behind the power-madness; just as the Soviets’ old “ministers of ideology” invented reasoning behind the Stalinists’ power-madness.

…with a high-profile rally at Seattle Center and a downtown parade, has now officially bankrupted its organizers. But another group has already stepped forward to stage at least something for this year, at the festival’s old Capitol Hill stomping grounds.

One of Capitol Hill’s last unreformed dive bars is still awaiting all the permits to reopen on Olive Way, but might finally be speeding up from stopped to slow.

…in Snohomish County thought the best way to pick up underage girls was to pretend to be an underage boy, live an elaborate made-up existence, and gain the unsuspecting girls’ confidence.

This sad case of exploitation and deceit flies against one of “alternative” culture’s longest-standing tenets, that women in general, and lesbians in particular, are the most righteous, morally purest creatures on Earth. I’ve long argued that women are perfectly capable of doing all the things men can do–including the bad things.

…(which officially has a name almost as long as the parade itself) won’t be ending with a rally at Seattle Center this year. Last year’s parade-rally, moved to downtown and the Center from Capitol Hill, gave the event greater “mainstream” visibility but lost $100,000. So it’s probably back to the (relatively) low rent district, away from the retail core and Belltown as well as the International Fountain.

…here in the Upper Left of America, in a week when the forces of expedient bigotry have, for now, been routed.

…and the only devil I saw was a certain ex-boss of mine, who showed up for the weekly session of Drinking Liberally. Mr. Savage sported a custom tee with the slogan CAN’T WE HAVE CRAIG KILLED?, in reference to the founder of a certain free-want-ads web site that’s put a wrench into print-media busines models across the country.

It’s been a decade and a half since Mr. Savage and co. were the new kids on the local-media block, with a surefire business plan that took ’em to the top. Now, newer outfits with newer surefire business plans are causing both “mainstream” and “alternative” newsprint publishers to run scared. Ah, the more things, well, you know…

We can only sympathize with the editors of the regional gay magazine 99, who stuck a fluffy li’l travel article about New Orleans (“At Play in the Big Easy”) into their current issue, then watched from afar as the awful stuff happened to the town while the issue was at the printer.

Until there’s a new TV contract, there won’t be a pageant. Gay guys will have to snicker at America’s Next Top Model instead.

Now we know why Spokane’s called “the lilac city.” The Spokesman-Review newspaper has forcibly outed Mayor Jim West, a onetime right-wingnut in the State Legislature, as a public homophobe but a closeted gay and, allegedly, as a long-ago child molestor. West denies the last part, but has admitted to having sex with men in the past.

It’d be sooooo easy to simply dis West as another dangeorus hypocrite, but I see something more poignant, more sad. Like most homosexuals in most of Euro/American society in most of modern history, West had to conceal his true self from the public world around him. As someone who chose the profession of politician representing conservative monied interests, he apparently felt he had to “double-closet” himself by outspokenly supporting the suppression of people such as himself.

One particularly ironic part: Spokane’s traditionally been an oasis of progressive-populist politics amid the reactionary-dominant deserts of eastern Washington and northern Idaho. It’s one of those places where gays gather to escape the bigoted attitudes once expressed in public by West. Last year, Spokane civic promoters floated the idea of creating a specific gay-nightlife district, expressly to create the lucrative urban image of a “creative hub.”

L’affaire West is a personal tragedy, irregardless of whether or not the boy-abuse part is true. I don’t go as far as the Seattle Times, which insists West resign. But I do believe he ought to pubilcly atone for his past public stances. He’s blundered himself (or rather, been shoved) into the opportunity of a lifetime. He can call, from deep inside the Republican Party’s street level, for an end to the GOP’s cynical hatemongering.