…there’s gonna be a segment about folks trying to save the Ballard Denny’s/Manning’s building, and why it should be saved.

…in Saudi Arabia arrested an American woman for sitting with a man at a Starbucks. (One of the news items about the incident included a pic of the chain’s Arab-world logo, in which the mascot mermaid is completely missing.)

NOW WE KNOW why David Letterman rattled off so many Mitt Romney jokes this past week—he wasn’t gonna get to tell ’em much longer.

One Shai Sachs has written several pieces on MyDD.com pondering what a progressive cable-TV channel might look like, and how it might be funded.

It’s an intriguing idea, pregnant with possibilities.

Let’s imagine one now.

Not just a little volunteer show on an access channel, but a whole 24/7 venture with a professional staff and everything.

There’s no shortage of potential material to fill such a channel. There are plenty of writers, pundits, and documentary filmmakers available to be tapped. There are plenty of national and international stories that could provide compelling viewing/listening, but are mostly or wholly ignored in today’s mainstream media.

ProgTV could also have arts/culture/entertainment segments, emphasizing “our” priorities in those realms (indie films, non-double-platinum musicians, live theater, literature, etc.)

There could be oral-history interviews, viewer-submitted video shorts (a la Current TV), unedited speeches (a la C-SPAN), funny fake news (a la Jon Stewart), funny real news (a la Keith Olbermann), historical docs, educational shows for all age groups, etc. etc. etc.

Ms. Sachs warns, rightly in my opinion, that any ProgTV shouldn’t try to replicate PBS, or adhere to outmoded institutional “objective journalism.” That, she says, is what got the “liberal” media so suckered into becoming BushCo’s mouthpieces in 2002-03.

I may have more ideas about this later on.

…Rudy Giuliani to kick around anymore. In other nooze:

• It’s a June trial date for the case of Seattle v. Sonics. That way there won’t be any distractions in the way like, say, playoffs…
• The state will stop the hideous practice of shipping inmates to out-of-state private prisons, far from families and appeal attorneys.
• When an independent entrepreneur deliberately bilks folks who pay into doomed investment schemes, he’s called a criminal. When, oh let’s say, banks and mortgage companies do it…
• “29 reforms.” Remember this number. It’s the number of changes a task force sez the city needs to make to bring more accountability to the Seattle Police.
• For now, Costco won’t get to buy beer and wine direct from their makers. A court said the chain has to still buy thru wholesalers in this state.
• Patty Murray hearts Hillary Clinton.
• Did you know Panasonic made TV sets in Vancouver USA? (Emphasis on the past tense.)

The TV this morn has lots of lovely snow footage from Tacoma, Lynnwood, and Issaquah. But here in the heart-O-Seattle, we’ve got some white-dusted rooftops and icy roads but little more. Alas.

…for Evening Magazine went lovely yesterday morning. We shot at a variety of locations, including the freshly re-closed (alas) Andy’s Diner and the under-destruction Rainier Cold Storage building.

Elsewhere in recent days:

• Blood bank bias. Say that five times fast.
• The next local company to potentially get bought out: Getty Images.
• Today’s AT&T: Wannabe Internet censors.
• Washington Mutual used to call itself “The Friend of the Family.” We didn’t know “the family” meant its own top execs.
• Seahawks coach Mike Holmgren: One more year, then it’s quits.
• With all the hoopla concerning oil spills and sludge, one can forget that diesel watercraft pollute the air too.
• This is the dawning of the age of asparagus.
• More Catholic boy-abuse claims are made, this time dating back to the 1950s.
• A research study by two “nonprofit journailsm organizations” concludes: Bush lied. A lot.

…local news of note the past couple of days, except for one item of great importance. Yr. o’b’d’n’t web-scribe will tape a segment for KING-TV’s Evening Magazine this Tuesday. No word yet when it will air. Stay tuned for further details.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Letterman, and his writers, staged a gala comeback Wednesday night. Could this be the turning point in the election?
• Seattle’s Landmarks Preservation Board agrees with us that the Ballard Denny’s building is potentially worth keeping. Meanwhile, Robert Jamieson quotes the manager of Seattle’s last extant Denny’s as being mad as hell about Saturday night ruffians. And he’s not even on upper First Avenue.
• What with shrinking ice caps and endangered polar bears, what do the Bushies want for Alaska? More offshore oil drilling!
• Child Protective Services could use a lot more social workers. Gov. Gregoire wants to help, at least a little.
• Could Wash. state voters really have a pivotal role in the Presidential nominating process this time ’round?
• A coyote was seen in the general vicinity of Magnolia Bluff. Insert your own joke here.
• Tim Eyman hates transit, loves roads.

Why doesn’t the Music Choice cable channel called “Musica Urbana” have any bands from downstate Illinois?

• “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.

With a high “five” from John Curley to the big ‘KING Mike’ balloon/float, the downtown holiday shopping season is among us.

I know I’m not the only one who saw something subliminally S/M-like about the real woman locked up inside a giant snow globe.

Then, at the Black Friday parade’s conclusion, always comes the fake snow shot out from TSFKATBM (that’s “the store formerly known as The Bon Marche”).

…goes out today to TV producer Verity Lambert, one of the first women with that career in the UK. She shepherded everything from Quatermass to Jonathan Creek, including the original Doctor Who, for which she stretched a Saturday-afternoon kids’ show budget to astounding, if now dated-looking, extents.