• Judy Lightfoot offers a thorough history of Metro Transit’s downtown Ride Free Area (originally marketed as the “Magic Carpet Zone”), which several powerful people believe is an idea whose time has gone. (I don’t.)
• Sierra magazine calls the UW America’s “greenest” college.
• Portland school officials campaigned directly for a school construction bond measure. That kind of campaigning is illegal there. The proverbial poo is a-flyin’.
• The right-wing Heritage Foundation calls Jim McDermott Washington’s least liberal Democratic congressperson. Their calculating is a little flawed.
• As an argument against that ranking, consider McDermott’s latest crusade, to make electronics companies prove they’re not buying “conflict metals” from brutal African warlords.
• Correction to yesterday’s Random Links: Turns out the Wash. state legislature’s ethnic-minority percentage isn’t 6.6 percent but 6.8 percent.
• Next year’s state budget battles are already underway. A public-employee union chief insists the state shouldn’t embark on a big transportation master plan without restoring some of the recent deep cuts to other vital services.
• King County’s searching for “true solutions” to endemic Latino gang violence, particularly in the southern ‘burbs.
• Could Shoreline extend its city limits into the next county?
• The conservative but “hip” Mars Hill Church is on the road to becoming its own national denomination. (Though it’s not using that specific word.)
• Bill O’Reilly’s Neanderthal attitude towards women isn’t just reflected in his on-air rants against contraception, but in his personal campaign of vengeance against his estranged wife and her new man.
• Not only do politicians and the Supreme Court mistakenly treat corporations as people, but marketing analysts see brands “becoming human.”
• The dumb “rapist as rebel hero” meme has spread from L.A. hiphop to open mic comedy nights.

• Despite what Republican politicians would have you believe, Washington state actually leads the nation in new business creation these days.
• One of these new businesses will be a downtown JC Penney store, in the old Kress five-and-dime store building at Third and Pike. That’s just a block from the old (1930-82) Penney store (Target’s going in on that site later this year). It’s great news, but what will become of the loveable, and vitally needed, Kress IGA supermarket in the building’s lower level? Its operators insist they’ve got a long term lease and are staying no matter what.
• It’s not just the state civil payroll that’s ethnically un-diverse. The state legislature is only 6.8 percent nonwhite.
• Local theater blogger Jose Aguerra asks whether local troupes are being too coy and inoffensive, even in their depiction of female orgasms. (In my day, Seattle’s live theaters prided themselves on presenting edgy, daring material, even if the promise was grander than the product.)
• A UW Medical Center administrator got caught embezzling a quarter mil from the hospital. You’re only hearing about it now because the state auditor made a statement publicly praising the U for how it investigated and prosecuted the inside thief. A potential huge scandal was thus turned into a low-key moment of triumph for the administration. At least if you read the Seattle Times version of the story. KOMO offers a far more critical spin on the affair.
• Grist.org’s David Roberts ponders what the heck Friends of the Earth is doing getting involved with right-wing lobby groups in proposing a “green” federal budget slashing scheme.
• The link we ran last week about the electric-guitar company? The company that got raided by federal agents, who were supposedly looking for endangered imported wood? The company flatly denies all allegations. And the Murdoch Wall St. Journal, ever eager to bash anything environmentalist, claims the feds could next go after folks who own old vintage instruments that contain now-restricted components.
• Should any of us care about speculation about the new Apple CEO’s private life? Ars Technica says no.
• Birth rates are dropping in many countries, especially those where female fetuses are sometimes selectively aborted. The Economist calculates some countries, at their current rates of decline, could totally run out of people in 600-700 years. Of course, if you’re not a dystopian scifi fan you know trends don’t stay the same, at the same rate, forever.
• Sasha Brown-Worsham believes “we should parent more like they did in 1978.” More Boo Berry and daytime TV; less overprotectiveness and constant fear.

• Those of us who were looking forward to that separatist, elitist Burning Man institution’s imminent demise are outta luck. A nonprofit is being formed to take over future annual festivals. Among other effects, it means those who go there this year for the first time will get to annoy everybody back in their hometowns in subsequent years, with sermons about how much more “pure” the festival used to be.
• Ex-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld held a book signing in Tacoma. Antiwar activists, including the widow of a Ft. Lewis soldier who committed suicide, tried to disrupt the proceedings and got roughed up.
• Can something really be done to stop drug selling in Belltown? I say, it’s not likely as long as the First Avenue glamour-bar scene keeps attracting so many affluent drug buyers.
• Ain’t them Sounders something? Well, yes they are.
• Despite the elimination of state tax breaks for filmmakers, one production is underway on the Eastside—a horrific true-life drama.
• As Wash. state’s government payroll gets smaller, it’s also getting whiter. Gov. Gregoire’s response: more “staff reviews” and talk about the importance of diversity.
• Gay marriage—here next year?
• For reasons I won’t get into, I witnessed the closure of the (high level) West Seattle Bridge late Saturday night. Sadly, it wasn’t due to road work, but to a jumper, who eventually “succeeded.”
• Gawker’s unsupported rant that Seattle was “a very annoying place” has made Seattlest’s “Seattle stereotyping hall of shame.”
• Qaddafi, Gadaffi, Gadhafi, however you transliterate the name—he lived the typical dictator’s opulence amid public squalor. And his son and daughter-in-law were grotesquely brutal to the household staff, in ways unimaginable outside of a Japanese gore movie.
• Megabucks campaign financing just continues to get bigger and more corrupt. But you knew that.
• And Republicans increasingly bind themselves around an anti-science, anti-thinking ideology. But you already knew that.
• Ad Age lists some lessons from past recessions, for those businesses that still need to sell tangible products to U.S. consumers.
• I keep getting asked about this, so for the record: The L.A.-based chain In-N-Out Burger is not, repeat NOT, opening in Bellevue. Not this year, not next year. It was just an Eastside food blog’s April Fool’s gag. Need proof? Just look at the link in the story for “View renderings of the new restaurant here.”

from alleewillis.com

• The Martin Luther King Memorial in DC will not be dedicated this weekend as scheduled, due of course to the hurricane. That gives more time for critics to bash the whole thing—for being designed and built in China (allegedly by unpaid labor); for being backed by big corporate interests King might have protested against; and for generally depicting King as a “dreamer,” not the rabble rouser and afflicter of the comfortable he really was.
• Veterans’ activists allege the suicide of a Ft. Lewis soldier a few weeks ago should be considered murder, committed by a military that utterly fails to tend to Iraq vets’ post-traumatic and other disorders.
• Campagne, the longtime upscale Pike Place Market restaurant that’s produced the annual Post Alley Bastille Day fetes, will now be called “Marché.” I guess it’s OK since that outfit a couple blocks away isn’t using the word anymore.
• The Boeing 787 was officially approved for passenger travel, more than three years behind schedule.
• Erica C. Barnett asks why the $400,000 the City contributes toward Metro Transit’s potentially doomed Ride Free Area couldn’t instead be used to buy automatic ticket-selling machines. Because that’s not free downtown transit for the people who need it, that’s why!
• In other transportation news, the Sightline Institute has the good news that young adults are driving a lot less these days.
• MSNBC host Dylan Ratigan has a new name for the billionaires and their cronies grifting from the rest of us for their own needless gain—”corporate communism.”
• Was your favorite American-made electric guitar built with endangered imported wood?

Here’s something I haven’t seen in a while. A new print zine. Eight photocopied pages, issued at an attempted regular frequency.

Even the content within it parties like it’s 1999.

It’s called Tides of Flame: a Seattle anarchist paper. Four issues have been produced so far.

Its slogan is “joy — freedom — rebellion.”

The joy promoted here is principally the joy of busting stuff up and calling it a political act. Yep, we’re back with the flashiest (and, to me, the least important) aspect of the ol’ WTO protest, the dudes who confused destructive hedonism with revolution.

Particularly in the first issue, which starts out with a photo of a shattered and tagged window at the Broadway American Apparel store. This occurred as part of a “direct action” episode earlier this summer during gay pride week. The zine describes it as “an unpermitted dance party” staged by “uncontrollable elements within the queer and anarchist circles.”

Why did they hate American Apparel, which puts gay rights slogans in its ads? Because the company’s been “endorsing the legalization and normalization of queers…. Clearly, the attackers had no intention of being either legal or normal that night.”

The first issue also contains a well-composed ode to the contradictions of urban “alt” culture. (Even if the essay starts by referring to “the useless phallus of the Space Needle.” Anyone who looked at its curves and angles can see it’s a feminine symbol!)

Other issues defend the prolific grafitti artist Zeb and promote “fare dodging” (riding buses but refusing to pay).

But mostly they’re against things. Cops. Prisons. Bureaucrats. Banks and the economic elite (an admittedly easy target). Urban gentrification. “Cutesy street art.” Wide swaths of modern society in general.

As with most U.S. “radical” movements built on the wild-oat-sowing of young white people, the Tides of Flame zine and its makers give emphatic simple answers to questions about the outside world, but raise unaddressed questions about their own program.

Can they reach out to make coalitions beyond their own subcultural “tribe”?

Have they got any ideas for building a better world, beyond just smashing this one?

At least there’s a sign the zine’s makers are asking some of these questions among themselves.

That sign is the zine’s regular “Forgotten History” section, recounting past radical actions in the city and region, including the Seattle General Strike of 1919.

(There’s more of this recovered history at the site Radical Seattle Remembers.)

• Warren Buffet “saved” Bank of America with a $5 billion investment. So now what should he do with it? How about breaking it up? Sell Merrill Lynch to help pay for Countrywide’s involvement in the mortgage bubble and subsequent crash. Then turn the retail banking operation into regionalized spinoffs attuned to their local communities rather than to the Wall St. casino.
• Seattle Weekly shrinkage watch: Seattle Bike Blog believes SW editor Mike Seely’s “ill-informed and widely off base” rant against the City’s “road diet” programs (re-laning schemes, sometimes including separate bike lanes) is part of a desperate agenda to bash Mayor McGinn for anything and everything, including programs actually started by the previous mayor.
• Media Matters parses, and debunks, the arguments made by media toadies in favor of Boeing’s union busting drives.
• Seattle’s new art mecca? The now sparsely occupied interior-decorator showrooms at Georgetown’s Seattle Design Center.
• James Altucher lists some little known facts about the recently retired Steve Jobs. These include several less than flattering things. None of those involve his role in the outsourcing of almost all North American consumer-electronics manufacturing.…
• …while Kelefa Sanneh believes the iPod phenom, with its penchant for mixing and mashing, has driven the music biz back toward flashy hit singles.
• The story we linked to yesterday, the one that was all aglow about Iceland flouting the global bankers? Seems it was somewhat exaggerated, alas.
• And for political point making combined with snarky laffs, explore the highly unauthorized by any campaign committee site, “What the Fuck Has Obama Done So Far?“

from bellevuebusinessjournal.com

• One of Bellevue’s truly worthy cultural institutions is closing, alas. It’s the doll museum.
• Organized flea markets and craft/vintage-wear group sales have been the rage this summer on Capitol Hill. One such enterprise took up shop on city sidewalks, which led City officials to crack down. Without a permit, that market (cleverly named “BadWill”) won’t be back.
• Certain Everett School Board members seem to need a time out period in the corner.
• Is it an attack on the poor to get rid of Metro’s ride free area? Or to drop one of the south end’s major artery bus routes?
• Forbes calls Melinda Gates the world’s sixth most powerful woman. Eight slots above Oprah, in case you’re counting.
• Some pundits predict that with Libya’s revolution down to the final mopping up, it’s time to look toward Syria for the next sequel.
• Remember when Iceland was going broke, having gotten too affected by the global banking kablooey? They’re poised for a big recovery/comeback. And without the enforced austerity or corporate welfare the global economic czars demanded.

• Seattle still doesn’t have its fully deserved NBA team back, or any fully formed plan to bring it back. But the promoters of a new LA pseudo-sport, “lingerie basketball,” say this will be one of the first places they hope to expand to. From first glance at this operation, the Storm has nothing to worry about.
• Seattle was named America’s #1 tech city, by a highly unscientific (hence less than geek-trusted) survey.
• Who loves (with their bucks) this year’s state liquor privatization measure? Costco (who started it) and Trader Joe’s. Who’s against it? Beer and wine distributors, who’d rather not see Costco gain the power edge them out of wholesaling. On the sidelines so far: Safeway, Kroger (owner of QFC and Fred Meyer), Supervalu (Albertsons).
• It’s smaller than the Gorge but at least as spectacular. It’s the new ampitheater at Mt. St. Helens.
• Intiman Theatre might come back from the grave. Just might, mind you.
• The US Dept. of Transportation has formally approved the deeply boring tunnel to replace the lovely, doomed Viaduct.
• Could JPMorgan Chase engulf and devour Bank of America like it did Washington Mutual?
• Network TV has fewer women in it this year, on either side of the camera.
• A Tea Party regional boss in South Carolina put up a “joke” on her Facebook page, about how cool it would be if Obama were assassinated. She’s now made her Facebook page private.
• Today’s “Google doodle” logo illustration is all about Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinian author born 112 years ago today. Yeah, that’s a strange un-round number of an anniversary. But then, oddities, conundrums, things that didn’t seem to make nice round sense were found all over Borges’ stories. (He didn’t write novels, though some of his short stories were about novels in a meta, recursive way.)
• Author Simon Reynolds says enough-already to the 20th anniversary of Nirvana’s Nevermind. Grunge nostalgia, he feels, is worse than pop eating itself:

…The more that the present is taken up with reunion tours, re-enactments, and contemporary revivalist groups umbilically bound by ties of reference and deference to rock’s glory days, the smaller the chances are that history will be made today.

• Juan Cole does something that a lot of pundits do, to my dismay. He posts a list of the “Top Ten Myths About the Libya War.” But he never quotes or cites these memes he’s denouncing. Who actually claimed Gaddafi was a “progressive,” or that he would not have massacred more of his own people given the chance? Cole only sources one of the assertions he puts down, quoting Alexander Cockburn as saying the war would end badly and Libya could get broken up at its end.
• Here’s the full text of Dennis Kucinich’s Hempfest speech calling for “a new activism in the United States.”
• Is it culturally insensitive to call a young boys’ sports league “midget football?”
• Much of Capitol Hill, including big swaths of Broadway and Pike/Pine, were rendered powerless by an electrical blackout Monday afternoon/evening. It lasted just long enough to mess up the commute home and close bars during happy hour.
• A Seattle U. report claims the South Lake Union developments have generated all the jobs they were predicted to generate back in the early 2000s, and a little more.
• The state’s now making the sellers of toys, cosmetics, and baby products reveal when their products contain any harmful chemicals.
• Mercer Island (sort of) street theater, part 2: Lefties put up a huge bare-butt balloon near Seward Park, with the caption SHARED SACRIFICE MY ASS. It was hoisted within view of Paul Allen’s M.I. compound.
• In case you wondered, the Elwha Dam will be dismantled, not imploded.
• Is this what we’ve descended to, a guy (author-essayist Sam Harris) pleading with America’s rich to put their money behind something, anything, more noble than their own selves?
• Hollywood scholar Matthias Stork has a name for loud, frenetic, disjointed action movies. He calls them “chaos cinema.” And he doesn’t like it:

It’s a shotgun aesthetic, firing a wide swath of sensationalistic technique that tears the old classical filmmaking style to bits.… It doesn’t matter where you are, and it barely matters if you know what’s happening onscreen. The new action films are fast, florid, volatile audiovisual war zones.

• R.I.P. Jack Layton, leader of Canada’s New Democratic Party, who’d led his left-of-center bloc’s recent push to become that country’s Official Opposition (i.e., #2 in number of Parliament seats). That was in May. In July he stepped down from the NDP, announcing he had cancer. Layton was a fighter for workers, for the homeless, for the environment, and for preserving Canada’s superior health care system.

1. Saw rePRODUCTION, a one-night-only burlesque revue at Theatre Off Jackson, a benefit for NARAL Pro-Choice Washington. The dozen or so acts were even more whimsical and comedy-based than most neo burlesque routines. This only made them more, not less, sexy. The sequence of stripping-to-pasties performances was broken up with a male stripper, a male puppeteer, a female acrobat (doing an aerial suspension routine from TOJ’s lowish ceiling), a drag king MC, and M/F and F/F duets. The acts’ themes included sex ed, contraception, female ejaculation (yes, there was prop-activated “squirting” into the audience), breast self examination, unicorn-on-woman fantasy sex, menstruation, STDs (with a dancer who strips off her bottom garment to reveal plastic toy “crabs” on her G string), and an anti-abortion protestor who winds up needing the procedure herself (performed un-preachy). It was a lovely time, ecstatically pro-sexuality and pro-empowerment. Because I sat in the front row, I had the following tossed at me from the stage: A stripper’s silk glove; a baby doll; condoms; a (thankfully fake) used tampon.
2. Attended, and briefly participated in, E Meets West, the Elvis karaoke spectacular at the Feedback Lounge, down in West Seattle’s fabulous Fauntleroy. The magnificent Helen Anne Gately was there, large & in charge. The thing about Presley “tribute artists” is the amount of creativity and individualism available, within (and perhaps because of) the discipline of a fixed repertoire of songs and the range of the Presley stage personae (from 1954 leather to 1977 glitter).

OK, so Seattle is one of America’s most predominantly caucasian big cities.

But it’s not nearly as totally white as some people seem to think it is.

Enter Sarah Lippek, who offers “a few words on the purported whiteness of my hometown:”

If you do not see people of color on your block, at your job, or in your schools, it is decidedly NOT because Seattle’s population is too white. It’s because your block, your job, and your school are actively maintaining racial segregation.

Lippek then explains our town’s history of restrictive “racial covenants” in real estate contracts. From there, she relates that while minorities aren’t legally forbidden from owning homes in large parts of the city any more, the legacy continues:

These boundaries were drawn by racist law, and are enforced by income inequity, imprisonment and disenfranchisement, the property-tax based education system, the drug war, repressive police strategies – and by white peoples’ continued willful blindness to the very existence of people of color in the city.

from stouttraveladventure.blogspot.com

• Tim Egan advises all weekend adventurers: When you go to the wilderness, expect conditions to be, well, wild.
• In today’s “fun with land use signs” news, somebody put up a fake sign on the fence outside one of the city’s several hole-in-the-ground lots where development got stopped three years ago. The new sign fictionally claims the hole will remain a hole, to be used as a “ground level ball pit pond containing 1,200,000 cu. ft. of rainbow plastic balls.”
• Seattle Weekly shrinkage watch: For the second week in a row, its cover story is faxed in from another Village Voice Media paper, with some local-angle paragraphs inserted.
• Wazzu to in-state students: “The UW doesn’t love you; we do.”
• Starbucks boss Howard Schultz might not be giving money to politicians, but his company sure still is.
• Neighbours, the legendary Capitol Hill gay disco, threatens to sue the state over those suddenly imposed “opportunity to dance” taxes.
• Clarification: Even if Hewlett-Packard spins off or sells of its personal computer line (the company only says it’s “exploring” such moves), it’s keeping HP’s printers and their way profitable ink cartridges.
• Netscape (the first dot-com stock bubble company) founder Mark Andreessen sees HP’s move away from selling tangible physical products as more proof of how “software is eating the world.”
• The NY Times has discovered “the dollar store economy.” Naturally, the NYT sees it from the point of view of corporate management, not desperate customers.
• Could green tech be the next recession-killing boom industry (and/or the next investment bubble)?
• As another long-thought-invincible dictator fades into invisibility (at this writing), one domestic financial analyst is quoting Karl Marx to describe the U.S. economic (and hence political) unraveling. (He’s neither predicting nor calling for any revolutionary uprising here.)
• But enough of the gloom. Let’s close this installment on a happy, fun-filled note. The laugh track machine, a pioneering landmark of tape-loop technology whose canned guffaws peppered countless sitcoms, variety shows, and even cartoons from the 1950s through the 1980s, was found earlier this year, by PBS’s Antiques Roadshow.

• Ex-Seattleite Tom Spurgeon wrote for The Comics Journal after I left there, then wrote for the Stranger after I left there. More recently, he’s had a debilitating medical condition, which he doesn’t fully explain in his hereby-linked essay. What he does discuss are his thoughts during his enforced bedrest, about comics, film, and being human.
• At least five enlisted personnel at Joint Base Lewis-McChord have committed suicide in less than two months. More needless casualties of the two needless wars.
• State officials found what they apparently thought was a simple “tax loophole” whose “closing” would generate much-needed revenue. It involves imposing “dance taxes” on bars and nightclubs—retroactively—based on a decades-old ordinance intended to regulate exercise studios. Some clubs say it could put them out of business.
• Unemployment in our state is still icky big.
• Amazon boss Jeff Bezos just gave $10 million to the Museum of History and Industry’s new complex at Lake Union Park, set to open late next year.
• If you don’t have enough to be scared of, just think about the “brain-eating amoeba.”
• Headline of the day: “Social Security Declares 14,000 Living People Dead Every Year.”
• The amorphous tangle of billionaire-funded “populist uprisings” collectively known as the “tea party” is massively unpopular. I mean massively.
• PBS’s Judy Woodruff tries to explain the consequences of extreme wealth inequality on a show underwritten by corporate funders out for a nearly-exclusively upscale audience…
• …while Amanda Marcotte (no, I don’t expect you to know all these web-pundit names) looks at right-wingers’ replies to the Verizon strike and declares we’re living in a new feudalism. So where are all the Renaissance Faire costumes?
• Among the top-grossing movies so far this year, you have to go down to position #8 to find a live-action, non-sequel, non-superhero film (Bridesmaids).

from thepoisonforest.com

• Gov. Gregoire wants the feds to consider declaring all of Wash. state a farm disaster area, due to this year’s long, cold, wet weather.
• The Seattle waterfront tunnel referendum, in which a “no” vote meant disapproval of the deeply boring tunnel scheme, got a seemingly unassailable 60-percent “yes” vote.
• In the City Council primaries, Jean Godden got under 50 percent of the vote; her general election challenger will likely be Bobby Forch. All other incumbents are sailing through into the general election.
• Earlier Tuesday, the City Council put a $60 car tab surcharge on the November ballot. It would fund assorted “transportation improvements,” i.e. transit and roads. (This is different from the $20 car tab surcharge approved by King County in order to save Metro Transit from the massive sales-tax collapse.)
• Today (Wednesday) marks the 25th anniversary of Rachel, the fundraising pig statue at the Pike Place Market. Yes, there will be a public event at noon. Yes, it will involve fundraising, for the Market Foundation.
• The Twin Teepees, Chubby & Tubby, the Playland Amusement Park—they all live again on the new Aurora Avenue commemorative mural. It’s at the east side of Aurora at N. 105th St.
• We’ve just one more month until Ballard’s legendary Totem House fish n’ chips shop reopens as a branch of Red Mill Burgers. The signature totem pole has been refurbished and re-installed.
• Could our region have another “La Nina” winter? Who the heck knows?
• The state Liquor Board will let sidewalk cafes serving booze go up in more places.
• So where are all the “green jobs” promised when the city got a big federal grant to help weatherize homes and businesses? The city says they’re coming, maybe later this year.
• Author Larry Sabato believes we’re in an age of “junkyard journalism” and have been since approx. 1979—well before Fox, even before Limbaugh.
• Verizon’s got big profits, but still wants workers to take big pay and benefit cuts. The response: 45,000 of said workers have walked out.
• Where do people think the economy these days is actually doing fine? In Washington DC, of course.
• You can’t even get into the same room with some Republican candidates unless you pay them.
• Psychiatry prof Nassir Ghaemi thinks when it comes to our leaders, sanity is way-overrated.
• The Mariners no longer have the baseball player named Milton Bradley, but the Seahawks just signed a football player named Atari Bigby. His highlight tapes should be accompanied by the “Pole Position” song, with hits denoted by the spaceship-explosion sound from “Berzerk.” The team’s defensive formations should look like the attack formations from “Space Invaders.”

j.p. at the pike place market centennial, 2007

• J.P. Patches (sometimes also known as Chris Wedes), the beloved former local kid-vid star, has announced he has terminal cancer and will retire from public appearances in the next year.
• For a time on Monday, the deal to save King County Metro transit with a car tab surcharge seemed in trouble. But enough Republican County Council members eventually came through. Yay!
• Speaking of which, you know Metro’s Route #48? The long route that goes almost all over Seattle except downtown? The Bus Chick blog relates the route’s hidden history. It was the result of a ’60s community drive to bring more bus service to the Central District, particularly directly from there to the UW.
• A book collector and an author claim storied frontier bank robber Butch Cassidy wasn’t killed in Bolivia but retired quietly to eastern Washington, where he lived until 1937. (Thankfully, that was long before the awful cartoon show that stole his name.)
• Speaking of cartoons, Renton police believe they’ve identified, and have disciplined the officer who allegedly posted those web animations critical of the department.
• The lady from suburban Detroit who got in trouble with her town council for having a vegetable garden in her front yard? She was in Seattle recently, and has some intriguing thoughts about what makes our city different from hers.
• SeaTimes writer Jon Talton really doesn’t like that Washington Mutual’s execs won’t get prosecuted for their role in the housing-bubble fiasco.
• Adventures in intellectual property: A heretofore obscure provision in the 1978 copyright law means recording artists can start reclaiming their rights to works from that era, away from the once mighty record labels, providing they give two years’ notice about it. Of course, the record labels interpret this part of the law far differently.
• Warren Buffett wants folks in his tax bracket to pay more taxes. Which will happen as soon as folks in his tax bracket no longer control the election process.