…to say in a newspaper opinion section that “To be anti-Bush is not anti-American.” Of course, he had to say it in a Brit paper….

…WHILE HERE ARE some more examples of “the New McCarthyism.”

An in-the-works Chris Ballew tribute album! I’d love to record a version of “Volcano,” if they’ll use it.

…you’re in cahoots with GW Bush’s assailant!

NAT HENTOFF WRITES about why there’s nothing truly patriotic about unquestioning rote obedience.

…or what would at least make for interesting new stories:

• Boeing fires Phil Condit; cuts costs by closing the fancy new Chicago HQ, establishing a less top-heavy corporate structure, and installing a smaller main office back in Seattle.
• The new Seattle Seahawks football stadium is named after the largest consistently-profitable company still based here. At Costco Park, all soft drinks come only in 24-packs.
• Two National Hockey League teams in U.S. small markets go broke. One moves to Winnipeg, the other to the Tacoma Dome.
• Baseball commissioner Bud Selig gets “contracted.”
• New York Mayor Bloomberg is forced to resign amid worldwide public outcry over his plan to tear down Yankee Stadium.
• Inventor Dean Kamen shows off a working, affordable, two-seater solar car. Every Republican state governor in America vows to never allow the thing on the streets.
• The major record labels lobby for emergency “survival” legislation allowing them to retroactively cancel all artist royalties whilst setting up government subsidies for executives’ mansions and cocaine budgets.
• Clever rust-belt entrepreneurs form a joint company to buy up underused and/or abandoned factories and mills. Their clothes, shoes, DVD players, garden tools, and other products all carry the same patriotic-themed brand name (perhaps “AmeriMade”). Their ads’ message: If you’re not willing to pay more for an AmeriMade product, you’re a bin Laden sympathizer.
• Democrats retake the U.S. House of Representatives, despite endless rants emanating from Limbaugh, Fox News Channel, the Wall St. Journal, The McLaughlin Group, etc. that anyone who doesn’t vote a straight Republican ticket is a bin Laden sympathizer. The new Congressional leadership begins to openly ask whether permitting further broadcast-media consolidations would be unwise.
• The New Republic runs a lead editorial admitting it is no longer a “liberal” magazine, and hasn’t been since 1983.
• Amazon.com becomes “profitable” by spinning off all its slower-selling product lines (hardware, appliances, sporting goods, etc.) to co-branded joint ventures with traditional retailers. The hardware operation, f’rinstance, becomes “Jack’sHometownHardwareAndBaitShop.com, Powered by Amazon.”
• Osama bin Laden is found in November on a remote island just like a soap-opera villain, having had plastic surgery to look like a whole other person.
• A cheap, simple-to-manufacture AIDS treatment drug is announced. Unfortunately for Muslim African leaders, it turns out to be made from reprocessed pork semen.
• High definition (or at least medium-high definition) TVs finally become popular, chiefly for viewing DVDs.
• Politicians in slumping tourist states propose Nevada-style regulated brothels, sparking a rift between the corporate and moralistic branches of U.S. conservatism.
• Gangsta rap completes its disappearance from the music scene when its last major audience (white mall kids) collectively decides it would rather pretend to be Mexican.
• An NFL head coach admits reports that he’s gay.
• Somebody figures out how to turn a profit from a “content-based” website. But the formula’s still too labor-intensive, and the potential return too low, to interest any but the smallest mom-and-pop sites.
• A major retail chain is reorganized as a co-op of local store operators.

A British-based condom manufacturer has issued a survey which claims Americans have a lot more sex on the average, with more partners, and starting at an earlier age, than folk in Britain, Germany, Japan, and 24 other major industrial countries.

What this might mean:

• Despite 20 years of the Religious Right’s anti-sex tirades (or maybe at least partly because of them), U-S-of-A-ers are just as buggery-obsessed as ever.
• The Muslim fundamentalists, and other overseas moralists, are right to fear the global reach of American corporate-pop culture. As countless staid Catholic and Mormon parents in this country already know, there’s nothing to get kids to challenge tired authority systems quite like the promise of nookie. Especially when it’s seen in the context of a whole American-export cultural shtick of sugar drinks, rock n’ roll, blue jeans, the open road, big cars, etc.
• This era of U.S. supremacy in the quantity (if not necessaarily quality) of coitus coincides with U.S. supremacy (for better or for worse) in military and economic power. This puts the lie to the Right’s claims that the non-repression of lust would turn us into a weak and vulnerable nation.
• Indeed, it might justify the rival claim, made by followers of Tantric yoga and of the late psychologist Wilhelm Reich, that a healthy sex life is a sign of, and contributor to, general personal vitality and social energy.
• Of course, more sex isn’t always better sex. Included in the survey’s average of 124 matings per year per American must be plenty of awkward adolescent experiments, unsatisfying marital acts, abusive relationships, lonely hooker dalliances, premature ejaculations, preorgasmic women, unwanted conceptions, and unimaginative fantasies. The continued prosperity of sex-ed guidebooks and videos shows that the most isn’t always the best.
• Porn doesn’t necessarily lead to promiscuity–or to monogamous vitality either. The least-sexually-active country in the survey is Japan, a place teeming with strip joints and raunchy adult comic books.
• These averages, if true, are still just averages. Please don’t feel anxious or depressed if you’re currently not getting any. And don’t stay in a lousy relationship just out of the fear of involuntary chastity.

(This article’s permanent link.)

…threaten protections guaranteed by the Constitution.” (Found by Follow Me Here.)

THE GUY WHO TRIED to move the Seattle Mariners to Tampa is now in line for a cushy federal appointment, despite his career history of shady dealings.

A SCOTTISH JOURNALIST wonders why the recent media hype over the “porno chic” women’s-fashion fad hasn’t involved actual porn performers.

“44 REASONS NOT to get a boob job.” (By the (male) author of “Why I’m Still Not a Libertarian.”)

‘TWAS A PERFECT DAY for the low-key recreation of the Alki Landing that served as Seattle’s official 150th birthday rite. That is to say, there was heavy rain, wind, cold temperatures, high tide, moderately heavy waves, and a near-total greyout (no visible horizon).

Some 1,000 people and 800 umbrellas braved the elements to witness volunteers playing the Denny Party showing up on a restored clipper ship playing the schooler Exact, then taking a small rowboat to the beach (where the real pioneers had been met by nearly-nude natives, not Gore-Texed honky families enjoying freebie chicken wings and Starbucks coffee).

The scene then moved down the shore to the 1905 landing-memorial obelisk, for a ceremony dedicating two plaques just added to it honoring the landing-party’s women and the local natives.

Lame-duck mayor Paul Schell gave a short speech, comparing his appearance to that of Gen. Douglas MacArthur at the far-better-attended 1951 100th birthday: “We do have one thing in common. We were both asked to leave.”

ELECTION ’01 UPDATE: The absentee-vote counting resumed today after the Veteran’s Day holiday weekend. Our boy Greg Nickels still leads, but by fewer than 1,600 votes. Today’s count, however, still included a number of early absentees, who trend more conservative. It’ll be the makeup of the late absentees, some of which were counted today and more of which will be counted in the next two or three days, that will decide it all.

ELECTION ’00 UPDATE: The news-media recount of the Florida ballots has finally been announced. Most headlines about the unofficial recount claimed Bush won it. But buried in the stories (or played up in ‘alternative media’ analyses of the results), you find that Gore would’ve won under six of the nine possible recount scenarios, other than the one the Republican-dominated Supreme Court threw out.

In other words, one can still plausibly say the election may have been stolen by the GOP sleaze machine, now hard at work attempting to recreate the social conditions of the Cold War.

Trick or Treat

by guest columnist Mr. Hedley Bowes

MUSINGS ON THIS PAST All Hallow’s Eve season:

It’s 1991 (the shitter) economically; and after hundreds of thousands of layoffs this year and entire sectors wiped out, the government and business communities are looking to consumers to save our collective asses.

Sen. Patty Murray introduced the “Let’s Go Shopping” bill, which would put the Federal government in the business of rebating state sales taxes for a 10-day period during the fourth quarter of the year. This was announced on Halloween, a day when we’ve all been scared into avoiding shopping malls at all costs, lest we put ourselves at risk of terrorists.

It’s been said quite often in the last month it’s our patriotic duty to go shopping. And spend money. Tell that to the corporate community and the venture-capital investors.

Never mind the record: Consumers continued to spend and buoy a sluggish economy in the four quarters since last year’s “election.” Business spending fell sharply after last November and has continued to be soft. Sure, there was a rush in the energy sector; for a while it looked like that would be where the action was. But look where Enron is today (near-bankrupt and seeking a buyer). Gasoline prices (everywhere but here) are the lowest in years.

The second “economic stimulus” package this year is aimed at stimulating big players like IBM ($1.4 billion), General Motors ($833 million), General Electric ($671 million), Chevron Texaco ($572)r, and Enron ($254 million). Any one of these corporations has the option to:

• A) take the tax break and rehire or retrain employees at risk of layoff;

• B) plow the money back into the balance sheet, thereby improving earnings and buoying stock value; or

• C) exercise option B, while shutting domestic facilities in favor of continued offshore outsourcing.

Go ahead. As a contracted bonus-getting, shareholding C-level executive, pick your optimal A, B, or C.

Krispy Kreme, a franchise operation not from here, opened its much anticipated and over-hyped Issaquah store early one late October morning. Lines formed the night before as people camped out. One would think Mick Jagger himself was making the fucking things.

We were privileged to have a friend who camped out overnight for the precious things. After tasting one, we can say the secret ingredient of Krispy Kreme doughnuts is their high fat content. The stuff is also very likely airwhipped with powdery sweet confectioner’s sugar. A new drug for these tough times.

What’s going on here?

Historically, this region creates national (and global) trends: Microsoft, Redhook, Starbucks, Chateau Ste. Michelle, Red Robin (and any number of mid to high end theme restaurants) K2, JanSport, et al.

But things have been so quiet around here lately that a relative unknown from across the country can come in and leverage enough free PR from the local press to offset hundreds of thousands of startup dollars. And people are lining up overnight, as if they were waiting for a rock star to show up. Nope, it’s just a doughnut.

Have we lost our special place as an idea and business incubator? Or did we simply over-commit to high technology (a once darling sector) and big business that we forgot about the little things (like doughnuts)?

Game Three: Made for TV. GWB throws out the first pitch in the third game of the World Series. I watched the final inning, waiting for truth to prevail. I wanted so much for Arizona to bring the game to an even 2-2, to take it into extra innings so that we might have some hope that this was not just a made for television win. But it was not to be. And so the writing is on the wall. Through their own special brand of black magic, New York was now certain to take all three games at Yankee Stadium and take the series in seven.

Is it a matter of will? Destiny? Or (as with elections, energy markets, layoffs, tax breaks, and doughnuts) just the way things are “meant to be?”

Thankfully, this was not the way it played out. I don’t favor the Diamondbacks that much (indeed, the irony of a bunch of “desert snakes” taking on the New York Yankees in this of all years was not lost on me)

But the Yankees have come to represent the way things seem to be done in America: Presidents not elected but awarded the post by a court; corporate executives taking bonuses on declining returns on top of salaries that outstrip those of average workers by multiples of 1,000. Our world seems to be one where things are not decided but predetermined, where the decisions we do make as a people are somehow subverted, where the deck is increasingly stacked toward wealth and power: Don’t Mess With Texans (or those with Texas-sized appetites for power, wealth, fame…).

Then, in the ninth inning of the seventh game, a simple sacrifice brought the wealth and power of dynasty down, leaving in their places a restored sense of truth and hope. What’s great about baseball is that it can accomplish this peaceably. Baseball, our national catharsis—this American oddity is still very much alive.

NAOMI KLEIN comments on the eerie connections between the war and the “intellectual property” cartel.

TAKE PRONOUNCIATION AUDIO CLIPS from an online dictionary, set them to music, and you get Dictionaraoke!

JOHN PILGER WRITES in the London Daily Mirror:

“The war against terrorism is a fraud. After three weeks’ bombing, not a single terrorist implicated in the attacks on America has been caught or killed in Afghanistan. Instead, one of the poorest, most stricken nations has been terrorised by the most powerful – to the point where American pilots have run out of dubious ‘military’ targets and are now destroying mud houses, a hospital, Red Cross warehouses, lorries carrying refugees.”

“…Before another child dies violently, or quietly from starvation, before new fanatics are created in both the east and the west, it is time for the people of Britain to make their voices heard and to stop this fraudulent war–and to demand the kind of bold, imaginative non-violent initiatives that require real political courage.”

“HOW TO BE PATRIOTIC and yet not the slightest bit reassured by Bush & Co.”

DESPITE THE DOT-COM CRUMBLE, you can still find an e-commerce site offering just about anything you’d like, including fully packaged election campains.

SOMEHOW, nothing quite makes a deluxe, keepsake holiday gift like a package of Oreo cookies.

…is apparently refusing to let people on planes if the management doesn’t agree with the flyer’s politics. (The official alibis.)

AN ONGOING LIST of civil-liberties cases and challenges related to the war.

FRANK RICH WRITES: “This is an administration that will let its special interests — particularly its high-rolling campaign contributors and its noisiest theocrats of the right — have veto power over public safety, public health and economic prudence in war, it turns out, no less than in peacetime.”