(Cross posted with the Capitol Hill Times.)

My book Walking Seattle, which I told you about here some months back, is finally out.

The big coming out party is Sunday, Sept. 24, 5 p.m., at the Elliott Bay Book Co. This event will include a 30-minute mini walk around the Pike-Pike neighborhood.

When I came up with the idea of a mini-walk, the store’s staff initially asked what the theme of my mini walk would be. Would it be about the gay scene, or the hipster bar scene, or the music scene, or classic apartment buildings, or houses of worship, or old buildings put to new uses?

The answer: Yes. It will be about all of the above. And more.

The reason: Part of what makes Capitol Hill so special (and such a great place to take a walk) is all the different subcultures that coexist here.

A tourist from the Northeast this summer told me he was initially confused to find so many different groups (racial, religious, and otherwise self-identified) in just about every neighborhood in this town.

Back where he came from, people who grew up in one district of a city (or even on one street) stayed there, out of loyalty and identity. But in Seattle you’ve got gays and artists and African immigrant families and Catholics and professors and cops and working stiffs and doctors all living all over the place. People and families go wherever they get the best real-estate deal at the time, no matter where it is.

On the Hill, this juxtaposition is only more magnified.

In terms of religion alone, Pike/Pine and its immediate surroundings feature Seattle’s premier Jewish congregation, its oldest traditionally African American congregation, the region’s top Catholic university, a “welcoming” (that means they like gays) Baptist church, Greek and Russian Orthodox churches, and a new age spiritual center. Former classic Methodist and Christian Science buildings are now repurposed to offices and condos respectively. And yet, in the eyes of many, the Hill is today better known for what happens on Saturday night than on Sunday morning.

A lot of Igor Keller’s Greater Seattle CD is a quaint look back at when this city’s neighborhoods could be easily typed, as they famously were on KING-TV’s old Almost Live!

Perhaps you might find a few more franchised vitamin sellers in Fremont, or a few more halal butchers near MLK and Othello.

But for the sheer variety of different groups and subgroups and sub-subgroups, there’s no place like this place anywhere near this place.

•

Though a lot of the time, these different “tribes” don’t live in harmony as much as in they silently tolerate one another’s presence.

To explain this, let’s look at another book.

British novelist China Mieville’s book The City and the City is a tale of two fictional eastern European city-states, “Bezsel” and “Ul Qoma.” These cities don’t merely border one another; they exist on the same real estate. The residents of each legally separate “city” are taught from birth to only interact with, or even recognize the existence of, the fellow citizens of their own “city.” If they, or ignorant tourists, try to cross over (even if it just means crossing a street), an efficient secret police force shows up and carts them away.

It’s easy to see that scenario as a metaphor for modern urban life in a lot of places, including the Hill. It’s not the oft talked about (and exaggerated) “Seattle freeze.” It’s people who consider themselves part of a “community” of shared interests more than a community of actual physical location.

The young immigrant learning a trade at Seattle Central Community College may feel little or no rapport with the aging rocker hanging out at a Pike/Pine bar. The high-tech commuter having a late dinner at a fashionable bistro may never talk to the single mom trying to hold on to her unit in an old apartment building.

Heck, even the gay men and the lesbians often live worlds apart.

It’s great to have all these different communities within the geographical community of the Hill.

But it would be greater to bring more of them together once in a while, to help form a tighter sense of us all belonging and working toward common goals.

illo to hugo gernsback's story 'ralph 124C41+,' from davidszondy.com

As we approach the Century 21 Exposition’s 50th anniversary, Seattle magazine asked a bunch of local movers, shakers, and thinkers what one thing they’d like to see this city build, create, or establish. Contributors could propose anything at any cost, as long they described one thing in one paragraph.

This, of course, is in the time honored local tradition of moaning about “what this town needs.”

In my experience, guys who start that sentence almost always finish it by desiring an exact copy of something from San Francisco or maybe New York (a restaurant, a nightspot, a civic organization, a public-works project, a sex club, etc.).

But this article’s gaggle of imaginers doesn’t settle for such simplistic imitation.

They go for site specific, just-for-here concepts.

Some of the pipe dreams are basic and obvious:

• Grist.org’s Chip Giller and the Seattle Channel’s Nancy Guppy want more, and more convenient, public transit.
• Former state Republican leader Chris Vance wants the Sonics back, and in Seattle Center not the suburbs, in an NHL-capable arena (I heartily agree).
• My ol’ acquaintance and ACT Theatre boss Carlo Scandiuzzi wants more treatment centers for the mentally ill.
• Greg Lundgren used his allotted paragraph to plug Walden Three, the comprehensive arts center he wants to build in the building where the Lusty Lady used to be (and which this web-space mentioned a couple of days ago).

Other dreamers dream bigger:

• Chris Curtis wants more farmers’ markets, at permanent locations, with community centers attached to them.
• Tom Douglas wants a new, efficient distribution system to get surplus food to feeding programs.
• Kraig Baker wants an “incubation fund” that would allow workers of all ages to take a “gap year” and explore their selves and their futures.
• Seattle magazine and Crosscut.com writer Knute Berger wants computer-graphic projections of how today’s Seattle might have looked if, say, the Denny Regrade had never been dug.
• Geekwire.com’s John Cook wants a privately funded “Billionaire University” to train the next generation of tech geniuses. (Compare this idea to that of Jordan Royer, who wants more voc-tech training.)
• Citytank.org’s John Bertolet wants a giant sci-fi weather machine to make it nice outside all the time.
• Publicola.net’s Josh Feit wants a “tax on the Seattle Process,” sending money out of politicians’ campaign funds for every piece of long-term-stalled legislation they propose. (The money would go to Chicago!)

•

As for me, I could be snarky and say that what this town needs is fewer people sitting around talking about what this town needs.

But I won’t.

Instead, I’ll propose turning the post-viaduct waterfront into a site for active entertainment.

We’ve already got Myrtle Edwards Park and the Olympic Sculpture Park for passive, meditative sea-gazing and quiet socializing.

The central waterfront should be more high-energy.

Specifically, it should be a series of lively promenades and “amusement piers.”

Think the old Fun Forest, bigger and better.

Think pre-Trump Atlantic City.

Think England’s Blackpool beach.

Heck, even think Coney Island.

A bigass Ferris wheel. A monster roller coaster. Carny booths and fortune tellers. Outdoor performance stages and strolling buskers. Corn dogs and elephant ears. People walking and laughing and falling in love. Some attractions would be seasonal; others would be year-round. Nothing “world class” (i.e., monumentally boring). Nothing with “good taste.” Everything that tastes good.

atlantic city steel pier, from bassriverhistory.blogspot.com

SIDEBAR: By the way, when I looked for an online image to use as a retro illustration to this piece, I made a Google image search for “future Seattle.” Aside from specific real-estate projects, all the images were of gruesome dystopian fantasies. I’ll talk about the current craze for negative futurism some time later.

• 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.

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.”

2005 fremont solstice parade goers at the lenin statue

• The Lenin statue in Fremont is privately owned, and is for sale. But nobody apparently wants to buy it.
• Minorities: Bellevue’s got a lot more of ’em these days, sez the Census. Seattle’s got a lot fewer.
• Art Thiel wants you to know the big Husky Stadium rebuild, to begin this winter, involves no taxpayer funds. Just private donations and bond issues to be repaid out of UW Athletics income.
• Ex-State Rep Brendan Williams wants Washington state’s progressives to “get some backbone” about preserving vital services in the state budget.
• Starbucks boss and Sonics seller Howard Schultz’s latest big idea: Big election-campaign donors like him should vow to boycott funding election campaigns. Of course, if Democratic donors like Schultz are the only ones doing the boycotting….
• There’s a plan to create a “Jimi Hendrix Park,” next to the African American Museum at the old Coleman School. It would be the fifth Hendrix memorial of one type or another (not counting the Experience Music Project, which parted ways with the Hendrix heirs during its development). Cobain still has just that one unofficial park bench in Viretta Park and a city-limits sign in Aberdeen.
• Rolling Stone put out a reader poll declaring the top punk acts of all time. The list put Green Day on top and included not a single female. FlavorWire has come to the side of justice with its own in-house listing of “15 Essential Women Punk Icons.” The NW’s own Kathleen Hanna, Beth Ditto, and Sleater-Kinney are on it, as is onetime Seattleite Courtney Love.
• Many, many indie-label CDs were in a warehouse that burned during the London lootings. Some labels might not survive the blow.
• Mike Elgan at Cult of Mac sez Apple’s invented all the big things it’s going to invent for a while. We’ve heard this one before.
• And for those of you heading back into the working life (you lucky stiffs, you), take heed Peter Toohey’s thoughts (partly inspired by the late David Foster Wallace) on “the thrill of boredom:”

Boredom should not be abused, exploited, ignored, sneered at, rejected or talked down to as a product of laziness or of an idle, uninventive and boring mind. It’s there to help, and its advice should be welcomed and acted upon.

illo from the 1962 world's fair guide book

• Knute Berger looks back at predictions for 21st century greater Seattle made during the 1962 World’s Fair. Surprisingly, population growth in the region is a bit lower than was then predicted. Still no flying cars or domed cities, though.
• The grownup Frances Bean Cobain has posed for a fashion shoot. All thin, dark haired, and attitude-y. But all those cigarettes? They’re not rebellious, just icky.
• Joni Balter, a member of the SeaTimes‘ “all taxes = bad” editorial board, surprisingly issues an essay decrying politicians who sign on to simplistic pledges, such as GOP operative Grover Norquist’s “no new taxes ever” pledge.
• Could the revised, Costco-invented, liquor privatization scheme actually increase state revenues? And, more importantly, would any extra revenues be eaten up by alcoholism-treatment costs and DWI prosecutions?
• Somebody’s prediction for where home prices will rise the most in the next year? Tacoma.
• If AT&T gets to take over T-Mobile USA, the latter’s 30,000 employees (including the 3,000 or so at its Bellevue national HQ) could be essentially done for.
• The state’s economy’s not getting any better any time soon.
• The plea-bargained “barefoot bandit” has a movie deal. All the proceeds will go to his crimes’ victims.
• A “revolutionary collective” has announced plans to protest Metro’s threatened service cuts by refusing to pay bus fares. Somehow I think this won’t help.
• Bert and Ernie are as (officially) non-gay as Laverne and Shirley.
• Standard & Poor’s and its fellow investment rating agencies have spent millions on lobbying to keep the financial markets unregulated. We all know how well that’s worked out.
• Bee Lavender at HipMama (the site based on the alt-culture parenting zine) has her own first person perspective on the London riots:

Many of the people out on the streets this week are usually invisible. They are part of an underclass, an underworld, where the rules are different and you have to take what you can to get through the day. Given the chance, many would in fact make something better out of their lives – but they don’t get the chance. What little equilibrium existed even a year ago has now vanished, and they are raging. Because they have no hope, no future, nowhere to go and nothing to do.

from furnitureminiature.com

• It’s the official best time ever to buy a house in Washington. Just set aside some of that vast expendable income you’ve got—what, you don’t?
• Before you rant about the presence of so many UW and WSU athletic brass on this list of the state’s highest paid employees, remember these coaches aren’t paid by the taxpayers, but by their programs’ self-generated revenue streams. And many of the other five UW officials on the top 10 get some or all of their salary from grants or other non-state sources.
• The state’s going to forcibly evict the homeless who’ve set up sleeping quarters alongside I-5, again.
• You ready for the repositioning of canned coffee as a hipster nostalgic comfort item?
• Remember that Rick Perry religious rally last weekend, with all the fringe-right-wing and racist/homophobic preachers? Turns out more than three times that event’s audience went to a free school supplies giveaway in the same city that same day.
• One of those “a new study reports” stories claims rich people are “less empathetic” than lower-class folk. One of the study’s makers concludes that “our data say you cannot rely on the wealthy to give back.”
• The English riots: It’s the income disparity, and the despair of the non-zillionaires.

• Those newfangled “3-D printers” can even be used to make motor-powered small airplanes.
• A judge knocked down the feds’ long-term plans for Columbia River salmon restoration, calling them vague and insufficient.
• The Belltown P-Patch cottages, the neighborhood’s last remaining “single family home” structures, are getting their old lead paint stripped off and replaced.
• Thanks to federal funding cuts and other snafus, 400 otherwise homeless people could get kicked out of local shelters soon.
• Dominick Holden has a handy primer on why you should reject the deep bore tunnel.
• You don’t have to go to the “whole paycheck” store to know “healthy” food can be costly.
• What’s really wrong with American discourse? Tabitha Justice believes it’s the “argument culture.”
• Ending on a lighter note, here’s some hilarious-in-retrospect images of completely ineffectual “disguising” by the East German secret police.

from sightline.org

• Congrats. Seattle’s been named America’s sixth most walkable city by WalkScore.com. It’s absolutely purely coincidence that WalkScore happens to be based in Seattle. Why, just two months ago, the Pedestrian and Bicycle Information Center named Seattle America’s first most walkable city, and that outfit’s in North Carolina or somewhere like that. (I’ll have more to say about this greater topic any week now.)
• The $20 emergency car-tab surtax to save King County Metro Transit stands a good chance of becoming a referendum to the voters, now that a fifth County Council member says she’s considering it.
• Long-shot City Council candidate Dale Pusey wants to keep the viaduct, at least as a park. I heartily agree.
• If our current postal system is snarked at by the digerati as “snail mail,” what will they call it if it cuts back to three delivery days a week?
• R.I.P. Alex Steinweiss, 94, who first had the idea of making original cover art for record albums back in the 78 era, and for decades continued to be the greatest practitioner of the art form he’d invented.

• When better toilets are designed, the Gates Foundation will design them.
• R.I.P. Bagley Wright, 1924-2011. A Princeton grad from Georgia who married into the Bloedel timber family, Wright was one of the five original Space Needle investors (hence the Needle’s original corporate name, the “Pentagram Corp.”). He also helped run the Seattle Art Museum and the Seattle Repertory Theatre, cofounded the medical-devices maker Physio Control, was a key player in downtown real estate development, was a major early investor in Seattle Weekly, and sold the house where Kurt Cobain died. He and his wife Virginia amassed a large contemporary-art collection, some of which is on view at their own gallery space.
• Anand Giridharadas believes it’s all well and good for bright minds to go to work at “social entrepreneur” projects, but he insists that “real change requires politics.”
• Buried in a story about PopCap Games boss Dave Roberts is an important lesson that always needs re-teaching:

…Making simple products is way more difficult than making complicated products…. Simple is more complicated, simple is elegant, simple is harder.”

• How I misspent my Saturday—getting lost in the Seattle Public Library’s historic 1962 World’s Fair pictures. I’m particularly fascinated by the name of a fair exhibit, the “Home of the Immediate Future.”
• Sable Verity wants the Seattle Urban League to come back strong from its recent misfortunes, and believes its once-and-future leader is not the man for the job.
• Close a hillside road. Bring in a dump truck, pre-loaded with 10,000 tennis balls. You can guess the wondrous spectacle that ensues.
• One positive result of the viaduct and 520 highway projects—the discovery of lots of pioneer garbage!
• Everybody in or near Seattle: Go see Mad Homes. It’s a site specific art installation occurring in a group of Capitol Hill houses set to be razed for apartments later this year. The 11 invited artists, given free rein to make “permanent” changes to the structures, have filled them and their front and side yards with fun and fanciful works. It’s up until Aug. 7.

pittsburgh post-gazette illo by anita dufalla, 2009

• Census data says even more of Seattle’s low-income population (some 68 percent) now resides in the suburbs. However, I’m not ready (as this linked article is) to declare the likes of Tukwila and Skyway to be “suburban slums.”
• New fun word of the day: “blagging” (defined by the BBC as “obtaining personal details by deception,” as in the Murdoch UK tabloids’ nefarious gossip trawling).
• R.I.P. Theodore Roszak, who was 35 in 1969 when his book The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society professed to know just what Those Krazy Kids were up to.
• Pyramid Hefeweisen is now called Pyramid Hefeweisen again, following a three-year failure to rebrand the wheat ale as “Haywire.” I could repeat my hefeweisen riddle here, but I won’t.
• There is such a thing as wearing too many clothes. If you’re in a mall. And you didn’t pay for some of those clothes.
• Amazon’s own tablet computer—look for it this autumn.
• The local ski season is finally over.
• Oh, all right: What do you call the last hefeweisen that causes a yuppie to total her new car? (Answer tomorrow.)

street food vendor, 1930s, singapore; from the-inncrowd.com

• More kinds of yummy street food could soon come to Seattle, as a deregulation proposal makes its way to the full city council.
• Also, the city’s asking the state Liquor Board for the authority to let some Seattle bars stay open after 2 a.m.
• Those toll-happy state bureaucrats are thinking about charging for the I-5 express lanes.
• Playboy has a natty profile of fast rising music/comedy/performance-art star Reggie Watts. Unlike New York mag’s Watts profile from last year, this piece gives full credit to his long formative years in the Seattle music scene.
• Lynnwood motorist sees ducks crossing the freeway, slows down. Semi driver behind said motorist doesn’t see ducks, doesn’t slow down.
• Hanford could become America’s newest, glow-in-the-darkiest national park.
• In nanny-state news, some doctor in Boston said obese children should be taken away from their parents.
• Clever Brit engineers have devised a $25 computer (basically a memory stick with a cheap little CPU attached; no screen or keyboard included) that schools could just give out to kids.
• Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell does turn out to have a larger agenda behind his offer to say “uncle” for now on the debt ceiling nonsense. He wants to bring back the “balanced budget amendment,” one of those recurring ideas that sounds hot on right-wing talk radio but doesn’t work in real life. The amendment McConnell wants would impose the same budgetary rules on the federal government that have already made California ungovernable.
• Those right-wing governors and state legislators around the country—how, you may wonder, do they simultaneously introduce the same brutal anti-labor, anti-women, anti-middle-class, anti-voter legislation? A lot of it comes from the same right wing think tank. And yep, the Koch brothers are in on it, big.
• American progressive pundits still seek a connection between the News of the World phone hacking scandal and Rupert Murdoch’s US media operations. Until they find one, let’s remember that the London-based NOTW aggressively spied on plenty of Hollywood movie stars. Its targets included actors working for Murdoch’s 20th Century-Fox—and even the Murdoch family’s celebrity friends.
• As he has a few times in the past, Jean-Luc Godard has again declared that “film is over.”

• The city’s looking into bringing back the soda tax, repealed in a state initiative last year.
• And our desperate-for-quarters city leaders have decided to extend paid-parking hours until 8 p.m. in just about all of greater downtown, including Belltown and the ID, plus the U District.
• But drivers in Seattle will get $3 million worth of pothole-fixin’, funded by the city selling a vacant lot on lower Aurora Avenue to the state.
• Another day, another 787 Dreamliner delay.
• AddictingInfo.com has a list of popular public services that anybody who claims to hate “socialism” should detest, in order not to be hypocritical—the post office, public schools, parks, etc. The thing is, some of the purist libertarians infiltrating the GOP do overtly hate these things.
• The Atlantic Monthly, that reliable source on all things rockin’, proclaims the new way for bands to become famous—remain as anonymous and obscure as possible.
• Michele Bachmann’s “doctor” hubby: He’s not an MD, just an unlicensed “therapist.”