…to the 27 people who attended my li’l book event at the Form/Space Atelier gallery. If I’d known I’d have had a mike and a stage and a desk, I’d have scripted something.

IN SATURDAY’S NOOZE:

• Declared too damaged to be preserved, the City’s allowed developer David Sabey to demolish the Stock House at theold Georgetown brewery complex on Airport Way, the pre-Prohibition home of Rainier Beer.
• A marriage made in heck: Wife runs a street ministry to drug addicts in Tacoma, hubby sells crack in Seattle.
• Sonic Boom Records is leaving Fremont, in another instance of the arty and funky disappearing from neighborhoods that have been sold to home buyers on the basis of their artiness and funkiness.
• BankAmericrap is bailing out Countrywide Financial, onetime big blowers of the housing bubble.
• Wash. state challenges the Bushies on draconian anti-privacy regulations.
• The ferry system doesn’t know where to put all its out-of-commission boats.
• What? You mean to tell me old pier pilings are bad for the water?
• Pat Cashman has a 30-year-old son, who won some online joke-telling contest. In other passage-of-time news, Madonna will be eligible to join AARP this year.
• And in case you haven’t heard, the Seahawks play an extremely important playoff game this afternoon.

• “A 29-year-old Wenatchee man told police a pterodactyl caused him to drive his car into a light pole…”
• The film Dancer in the Dark notwithstanding, no woman has ever been sentenced to death in Wash. state. Sadly, this might change.
• Spokane Catholics have raised $8 million to help pay abusive-priest lawsuit settlements.
• Help a rural flood victim— donate a cow.
• Sonics fans (and, yes, there still are many of us) have a new mantra. During last night’s laugher against the even more pathetic Timberwolves (which the Sea. Times chose to cover on sports-section page D14), when fans were encouraged to make noise during an opposing-team free throw, the repetitive shout came loud and clear from the rafters on down: “Clay Bennett sucks! Clay Bennett sucks!” TV announcer (and all around good guy) Kevin Calabro responded with a brief giggle, before he returned to strictly commenting on the action on the floor.

• 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.

How does the Hollywood establishment adapt the Great Atheistic Children’s Novel? By scrubbing all the anti-religious stuff out, naturally. (Link may require paid registration.)

• Another nightclub shooting. This one was at Sugar, near the Comet Tavern on Capitol Hill. Three patrons were injured. Apparently the shooter was celebrating “National Ammo Day” one or two days early.
• Mars Hill Church hasn’t opened its new Belltown branch yet, but the SeaTimes sez its five current locations, with 5,000 average total weekly attendance, make it “Seattle’s largest congregation.” And with growth has come the controversial firings of two pastors.
• Reps. Norm Dicks and Adam Smith say we’ve still really got to get the heck outta Iraq.
• Today’s online scare story comes to you from the state Attorney General, who wants us all to be deathly afraid of strangers offering Wi-Fi connections.
• Dino Rossi apparently was raising campaign funds before he officially announced he was running for Governor again.
• The bigot billboard near I-5 in Lewis County is still out there, with “Uncle Sam” spouting one cruel “joke” after another.
• Did ya know Washington State Ferries still actively uses 80-year-old boats? They are, and yeah, they’re showing their age.
• Caffe Vita is making documentary videos about the lives of coffee growers in various countries.

…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.

…Tabella is selling its space to Ballard’s Mars Hill Church. So, instead of drunken gay-bashers on Saturday nights, Western Avenue will have sober gay-denouncers on Sunday mornings. Yes, that’s an improvement.

IF ANYONE WAS AT the big and costly Hillary Clinton to-do in town Monday night, I’d love to hear about it. I do know the rightist protest scene outside Benaroya Hall wasn’t so big as it had been at her prior visits.

PARKING-LOT CZAR Joe Diamond may be dead, but he’s still a stern taskmaster. Diamond company officials earlier this month said they’d forbid tailgating parties before Seahawks football games on Diamond-owned lots. Now comes a revised edict: Go ahead and party, but don’t be seen with any booze.

SEATTLE’S MOST FAMOUS “We Never Close” restaurant is closed today. A chimney fire has shut down 13 Coins since about 4:30 a.m. Tuesday; it may reopen for tonight’s dinner shift.

IN VANISHING SEATTLE NEWS, the famous Wonder Bread neon sign will rise again, on the apartment building that’s replacing the former Central Area bakery site. Once again, the mark of wholesome blandness will draw motorists to what has traditionally been Seattle’s least whitebread neighborhood.

KUDOS TO 13-year-old Aaron Furrer of Monroe and his Guernsey heifer Dot for winning a big juniors-division prize at the World Dairy Expo in Madison, WI. Buried deep in the hereby-linked article: Furrer’s family can no longer turn a profit on their 46-acre dairy farm; his dad now works as an electrical contractor just to hold on to the land.

OVERHYPED TRAGEDY OF THE DAY: “A jury Monday convicted a former stripper turned Olympia, Wash. soccer mom in the decade-old murder of her fiance. Mechele Linehan, 35, was convicted of first-degree murder for conspiring with another fiance to kill Kent Leppink, who was shot three times in 1996 near Hope, AK. Prosecutors say Linehan wanted Leppink’s $1 million insurance policy.”

IF YOU BELIEVE what you read in the papers (or on the papers’ web sites), Shirley McLaine says Dennis Kucinich once saw a UFO outside Graham, WA. Make up your own comment here.

…of the non-denominational “winter” decorations being designed for display at Sea-Tac Airport this December, they seem to be preparing to celebrate Festivus.

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.

• Worked the orthodontists’ convention. Long, tiring, dull, but at least I don’t have to look into strangers’ mouths all day.
• Found myself photographed in the current Seattle magazine, in a piece about the local Drinking Liberally meetups. (The pic’s on the mag’s Web site, and is one of the least dorky pics of me in a drinking situation in some time.)
• Felt indifferent about the end of Jerry Falwell, the mainstream media’s favorite pious bigot. As I do whenever a left-wing celeb of stature similar to Falwell’s dies, I asked myself just what Falwell had actually accomplished, beyond his media image.As a “televangelist” he was second-tier in viewership. His Moral Majority political organization never had the “millions” of dues-paying members that he claimed, and which too many liberals readily believed. As a religious-right mover-n’-shaker he was also somewhat less influential than he put himself up to be, compared to the likes of Ralph Reed and James Dobson.

  He did create one of the first big suburban megachurches, establishing a model that would be further developed by more mass-audience-acceptable successors around the country.

  And he successfully snookered the news media, and many of his ideological opponents, into believing that he, Falwell, personally led a mass groundswell of reactionary fervor out in the vast expanses beyond the U.S. media capitals. For nearly a quarter century, millions of non-right-wing Americans accepted this concept.

  Falwell was a man who made people believe.

…that the “religious right” is oxymoronic by nature, because neoconservative philosophy is inherently anti-Christian.

…in local controversy over its plan to abandon its historic downtown Seattle building, isn’t simply facing dwindling memberships due to suburbanization and “family flight.” The denomination’s also the target of a well-funded right-wing campaign to split it apart, along with the other old-line Protestant sects who might challenge the fundies’ claim to be the only real Christians. More on these allegations here, here, and here.

…for not having posted previously this week, some news briefs:

• Thanks to the ever-alert, and doomed, Knight-Ridder Washington Bureau, here’s a quick guide to why we’re having a “recovery” just for the rich.
• The lonely hobby farms of my Snohomish Co. childhood have almost completely become lonely suburban tracts.
• And there’s yet another story of local Methodists wanting to consolidate and maybe get out of another building.
• Exactly how will a one-day visit by a Hollywood movie star put Aberdeen “on the map?”
• To show how pathetically the left has sunk into defeatism, even the Stranger’s wondering aloud whether Democrats oughta talk more like Republicans.
• The cooling tower that undoubtedly inspired the Simpsons skyline is gonna be imploded.
• Sneetches running to the Star-Off Machine, automotive division: It’s hip to have square wheels.
• A New York magazine essay complaining about the rise of writers stealing from other writers may have been largely stolen from other writers.

• The April Belltown Messenger is finally out, delayed due to equipment installation at the printer. It’s got a big essay by me comparing five of the neighborhood’s churches on an aesthetic/cultural level.
• Should antiwar activists learn to think more like warriors?
• Imani Mance asserts, meanwhile, that “activists can no longer afford to be broke.”
• Peter Steinbrueck dislikes the new development rules that allow more highrise towers with nothing but blank walls at the sidewalk level.
• The NY Times has scrapped the dozen or so pages of stock prices that used to fill its back section, figuring anybody who really wants them can find them online. Now, if they’ll only start printing the investment data that really counts these days–the going rates on eBay for role-playing-game “strength points.”
• If Mac computers can now seamlessly run Windows, how will software companies still be persuaded to write applications for Mac OS?
• We apparently missed the demise of Dark Shadows creator and Night Stalker producer Dan Curtis.
• But we did catch the death notice of George Carlson, a real-estate executive who dabbled in television. His show, known locally as Northwest Traveler and syndicated as simply The Traveler, ran once a week at 7 p.m. for 13 years. The show was a simple travelogue. Carlson, in the studio, would interview some local affluent couple, who then narrated 16mm film footage of their last trip to India, Egypt, Taiwan, or some other place where the natives don’t even speak the same language we do. Because this footage was silent, Carlson stuck syrupy library music behind the narration. It was all a relic of a simpler time, one might say.
• Bill Nye the Science Guy goes to Waco, TX; gets a silent protest when he politely disses creationism.
• If you’re going out Friday in Seattle, you might consider attending the book tour by leading progressive bloggers Markos Moulitsas Zuniga and Jerome Armstrong, plugging their political repair manual Crashing the Gate. They’re speaking at 7 p.m. at the Labor Temple, 2800 1st Ave. On the Eastside, they’ll be at Marymoor Park at 11:30 a.m. Saturday. Be there. Aloha.

…periodic dinner-table moments of grumpiness, my father used to complain that the Catholics and the Mormons were to increase their numbers through hyperactive breeding, for the ultimate purpose of world domination. Now, others are making similar claims about red-state Republicans.