…endorsed Obama as the Democratic candidate of choice in the Washington caucus/primary combo. As David Goldstein sez, it’d be more impressive if they didn’t endorse a Republican.

Last night I finally saw the local Spanish-language newscast on KUNS-TV, Fisher Communications’ Univision affiliate. The same program also airs in Portland on KUNP, also Fisher-owned.

As you might expect, the broadcast makes heavy use of redubbed footage from Fisher’s Anglophone KOMO and KATU. But it also has original coverage of stories aimed at the Univision audience (immigration, citizenship, farm workers, etc.) The sports segment that Friday included a lot of Latin American soccer highlights before it previewed the NFL playoffs. An in-studio interview with a lady painter, featuring cutaway shots of her works, included two langorious and uncensored nudes—a rare sign of a local broadcast station’s respect for its audience’s maturity.

Then there were the commercials. They featured, besides redubbed versions of familiar Anglophone spots, two categories you normally don’t see on local newscasts—Christian music CDs and class-action lawsuit attorneys.

The Univision audience, at least around here, is thus perceived by its sponsors to be both pro-Jesus and anti-corporate.

Political types who wish to reach the nation’s growing Latino segment might wish to ponder this.

…before pay-per-view cable channels, championship boxing matches used to be telecast exclusively on “closed-circuit” feeds to movie theaters and arenas. For home audiences, the promoters would license one TV or radio network to broadcast a studio-based show, in which an announcer would read round-by-round descriptions of the action transmitted by teletype from the fight venue.

This is the closest precedent I can think of for “live blogging.”

One of the chief live-blogged events every year is Steve Jobs’s keynote address at the Macworld Expo, Apple’s chief vehicle for announcing new products.

Yes: An event that’s all about the latest, greatest, and shiniest electronic media devices gets its first communication to the outside world by the modern equivalent of telegraph-era technology. Guys with WiFi-equipped laptops sit in the audience and type out brief descriptions of what they hear and see.

(Apple used to try live online video streams of the Jobs speeches. But they never mastered the bandwidth issues. Online video is better suited for recorded content and niche audiences than for a lot of people watching the same live thing.)

So, like thousands of the Mac faithful, I went to Mac news-and-rumor Web sites to read about what Jobs was saying while he was saying it, accompanied by the occasional still digi-pic.

I’ll let other sites explain what Jobs said and showed. As many sites predicted, there’s a new really thin laptop computer, online movie rentals (some in hi-def!), and software updates to the iPhone, iPod Touch, and Apple TV. There’s also a new wireless external hard drive. All the live bloggers gushed in insta-print over all the stuff.

But they disagreed with the show’s closing entertainment. Jobs trotted out one of his celeb pals, Randy Newman. He performed “A Few Words in Defense of Our Country,” his return to his old snide singer-songwriter act after several years of toiling in the family business of soundtrack composing.

One live-blogger, Jason Snell, was apparently only used to Newman’s movie songs. Here’s Snell’s comments, reconfigured into chronological order:

“Randy’s singing a song about America, the president, and comparing them to Hitler and Stalin. USA! USA! USA!!!!!“’It pisses me off a little that the Supreme Court is going to outlive me.’” What the crap is he singing about? We have no idea. We think he’s gone nuts.

‘The first song’s over, but now Randy Newman’s just riffing about random stuff. The next song is from Toy Story. Randy says he wrote another song to go with the love scene between Buzz and Woody, but the scene was cut. This guy is blowing our minds right now.

“Holy crap. Who knew Randy Newman, the guy who makes the songs your kids play over and over and over again, would sing such crazy crap about our government?”

My question is different: Who knew such impolite but lucid talk about the end of the American empire would find an outlet at a Fortune 500 company’s PR show?

Jim Demetre has a response to Charles Mudede’s review of Seattle’s Belltown.

• The easy half of the equation has been solved, as Clay Bennett agrees to sell the Storm to owners who’ll keep the WNBA team here. The hard part, wresting the Sonics from his reverse-Midas-touch hands, now begins in earnest.
• Meanwhile, the guy who got us into this mess in the first place by selling the teams to Bennett is making new moves at his day job. Starbucks chairman Howard Schultz has fired his CEO, retaking the reins himself. Can he return the coffee chain to its former fast-growin’ ways, in spite of all the obstacles? (Among the latter: espresso drinks coming to McDonald’s.)
• Some folks got pretty snow this morning; the heart of Seattle, again, didn’t. Damn.
• The Port of Seattle’s fiscal shenanigans will be investigated by the Feds.
• House prices finally begin to go down in the area. (Insert your own “going down” joke here.) Still, local biz leaders insist it’s not that drastic really. Meanwhile, developers who’d planned to condo-convert Seattle’s historic Smith Tower are scaling back their plans; now only the top 12 stories will be converted.
• My second-ever adult job (such as it was), the student newspaper Polaris at North Seattle Community College, is a goner.
• Blacks are more likely than whites to get busted for having or smoking pot, even though that’s now the city’s official lowest law enforcement priority.
• In more positive law-related news, “serious crime” (as the FBI defines it) is way down in western Washington’s cities these days. That, alone, won’t stop the media from exploiting the occasional random shooting, or stop the talk-radio nebbishes from preaching the city=danger, suburbs=serenity meme.
• An election year’s underway. You can tell because a politician, in this case Gov. Gregoire, is trying to generate headlines on the get-tougher-on-drunk-drivers line, the encroaching-surveillance-state issue on which no one dares to disagree.
• Woodland Park Zoo tries again to make its own cute li’l baby elephant.
• The men’s fashion headline of the year is “Return to Elegance.” Just as it’s been every year since at least 1978.
• 12,000 people in Idaho lost electricity due to a stray cat wandering through a substation. Brian Setzer remains at large.
• Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert returned to their cablecasts, just in time to give writerless jokes about the New Hampshire primary.

…as you may know. But I like sometime NPR contributor John Hockenberry’s account of how he never quite fit in at Dateline NBC. He alleges the show’s producers (1) wanted only stories with an “emotional center,” but only if those emotions were the ones the producers wanted to exploit, (2) didn’t get that the Internet age was irreversably fragmenting the former mass audience, and (3) were too caught up in corporate-culture nonsense that actively discouraged creative thinking.

…in I don’t know how long, my work is the subject of serious criticism. My erstwhile Stranger colleague Charles Mudede has written a nuanced, lucid review of Seattle’s Belltown.

Essentially, Mudede seems to like the book for what it is, but wishes it had more. That, I’ve learned, is a common response to Arcadia Publishing’s slim photo-history tomes. Arcadia’s formula of many pictures and few words has proven very commercially successful, here and around the country. But many aspects of any place’s story will necessarily get left out by this broad-strokes approach. Some readers would like more oral-history material. Some would like more human-interest anecdotes. Some would like longer passages about specific people and places of interest to them.

Mudede specifically wishes Seattle’s Belltown included more emotional, human history. He’d have liked more of “a sense of horror or sadness or wonder at the great and rapid sequence of events that shaped Belltown.”

And he’d like the book to have a stronger sense of advocacy. After all, he notes, the neighborhood’s an “explosive battleground of competing land use and architectural ideas, of private and cultural capital, and a variety of class issues. Even in a book as small as this, one wants the writer to take a stronger position on these pressing matters, presenting not only conclusions but also solutions.”

These are all good things to yearn for, and not just in books.

It’s a level of discourse beyond Arcadia’s format. (They are trying to move units through Costco and Walgreen’s.)

But it’s certainly something I can work harder at in my other forums, including the Belltown Messenger and this site.

Have I got answers to the ongoing disappearance of living-wage jobs, affordable housing, artist spaces, and the Crocodile? No, at least not any good ones, at least not tonight.

But let’s keep talking about it.

• Seattle’s first snow scare of the season was, as I’d expected, a bust, but here comes another.
• What the P-I calls “affordable-housing developers” (what, you didn’t know there were any of those?) rant that the City of Seattle doesn’t provide enough zoning and other incentives to let ’em profitably build more units for folks closer to “median” income levels. Of course, with the few megarich driving “median” income levels ever higher, the definition of for-profit “affordable” housing inches further away from what working families can afford.
• Meanwhile, Bellevue officials ponder regulations to deal with suburban “megahomes” that flaunt their materialistic corpulence over their neighbors.
• The last of the four Pine-and-Belmont bars has closed prior to condos taking over the half-block. Manray’s demise ends a tradition that goes back nearly 20 years, when Squid Row took over what had been a dive-bar space called Glynn’s Cove. Squid Row begat Tugs Belmont, which begat Kincora. Then came Bimbo’s/Cha Cha, Manray, and the Bus Stop (which begat Pony). The strip’s demise got the expected long mega-coverage in The Stranger; the Cha Cha had been the longtime favorite watering hole of several Stranger staffers.
• The P-I catches on to a story first iterated a year or more, I believe, by the Weekly, that Costco treats its workers nicer than the Wall St. investment community thinks it should, resulting in greater sales and profits. Why, if word of this leaks out, the whole economic excuse for screwing the masses could collapse!
• You don’t have to go to Wash. DC to see Democrats cowering in submission. They’re right here, ramrodding an emergency session of the State Legislature to appease Tim Eyman.

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.

…so I guess we can talk about it now: Downtown Seattle just might, might mind you, be about to face a luxury-condo glut. Of the umpteen projects currently announced, some may not get built. Developers, natch, say all’s still well n’ fine, not to worry, bubble-what-bubble?.

IT’S NOT JUST A FEW BAD APPLES, it’s dozens of bad apples and alleged bad apples: Over the past five years, 125 schoolteachers in our state have been “punished for sexual misconduct,” including unwanted groping and rude remarks toward students. The usual question: Are teachers getting ruder to students, or are students/parents/administrators getting more nerve to press charges?

IN OTHER SCHOOLHOUSE RUDENESS, vandals over the weekend disabled the Snoqualmie School District’s entire fleet of school buses.

JOHN S. MURRAY, 1925-2007: The former state legislator owned the Queen Anne News and Magnolia News from 1953 until sometime in the 1980s. (They’re now the prime properties of Pacific Publishing, which also owns the Capitol Hill Times and has a sales contract with the Belltown Messenger.) Murray also acquired, and ran into the ground, the downtown-insiders’ tabloid Argus and the pioneering local slick monthly View Northwest. In all these, he ran editorials advocating a square, pre-extreme Republicanism, and in which his prose repeatedly revealed he was a businessman and not a scribe. Murray also owned the old News Publishing printing plant on Third Avenue north of Bell Street, recently demolished for the Moda condo project.

AND REMEMBER, tread lightly in the woods if you’re scavanging for wild mushrooms. Of course, with some of those fungi among-I, you can just float out of the wilderness…

The rich just keep getting richer. As of the most recent available statistics, the top 1 percent of taxpayers control one fifth of the nation’s wealth.

CBS’s Dick Meyer calls this the deliberate result of “Trickle Up” economics. And, he asserts, Republicans, Democrats, and baby boomers all support the policies that keep so few getting so much.

The media biz is finding less money to pay for content, says an unpaid “reader blogger” on the P-I site.

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

Got the October Belltown Messenger done. It’ll be out (and online) next week, and it’s a smash if I do say so myself (and I do).

Been working on a deal to get my old local music book Loser more available.

Been trying to teach myself at least enough programming to bring this site into the 21st century, tech-wise.

Without making a big PR fuss about it, KIRO-TV’s quietly moved into high-definition local production. Last night’s prime-time documentary special, Cold Facts About Our Warm Planet, was particularly notable.

With lush HD videography and few commercial interruptions, it showed the local effects of global warming. We saw shrinking glaciers, prematurely melting mountain snowpacks, tinder-dry forest lands, declining salmon runs, potential sea-level rises, and more.

It was all narrated by a low-key Steve Raible. (How’d he grow up so smart, when his fellow early Seahawks star Steve Largent went wingutty?) Raible calmly took us through the evidence and the arguments about our current warming trend. He explained the background science, with the help of UW scientists and experts.

Raible stayed away from casting blame or judgmentalism, and rightly so. If global warming really is influenced by human activity, and I believe it is, it’s taken the entirety of human civilization to get us there. Anti-SUV sanctimony won’t save the planet. That can only occur with a lot of big and small steps by a lot of people, including people whose current lifestyles are different from yours.

Kudos to Cold Facts’ writer-director Ben Saboonchian and videographer Peter Frerichs.

I don’t know if or when the station will repeat the special. It should, and it should put the whole doc up online.