• “Hard-core GOP flee Bush, pollsters find.”
• Someone’s planning a cable-TV channel just for infants. Something tells me it’ll also find an outside-the-target-demographic audience of ravers and stoners.
• Stan Stapp, the pioneering neighborhood-newspaper publisher whose passing was announced yesterday, was one of the last old-time newspapermen. The North Central Outlook, which his family owned from 1922 to 1974, was fiercely devoted to both neighborhood coverage and to what used to be called “spot news.” Somehow, Stapp and his longtime associate editor Trudy Weckworth balanced homespun folksiness with an “if it bleeds, it leads” sense of priorities. This mix was most exemplified in Stapp and Weckworth’s notorious police-beat column, “Hash Ground Fresh Weekly” (which they periodically revived, either solo or as a collaboration, in several later papers).
• In the “Hash” spirit, here’s a nice heartwarming story about a stripper fighting back against police entrapment.

• Bill Clinton’s attached his name to a drive to get soda pop out of grade and middle schools. Remember: When being a Pepper is outlawed, only outlaws will be Peppers.
• We must say goodbye to financial reporter and early PBS star Louis Rukeyser. His pallbearers, I’m sure, will be “the elves who compile our technical market index.”
• The guy in charge of Ohio’s either incompetent or corrupt election system is now that state’s official GOP gubernatorial nominee. As if you’d expect him not to win somehow.
• Lay’s potato chips—now with “good” cholesterol.
• Sign of the Apocalypse #532: Mickey Mouse goes CGI.

Bush attended the annual White House reporters’ banquet Saturday night. Faux-reporter and self-deemed superpatriot Stephen Colbert gave a shockingly satirical speech, totally in character.

The so-called “MSM” chose not to discuss the speech, preferring to report on the banquet with footage of Bush himself appearing in a comedy skit with a lookalike. But online videos and transcripts of Colbert’s performance spread all over. As have bloggers’ responses to it.

A freshly-minted “Thank You Stephen Colbert” fan-blog has logged more than 10,000 responses from grateful viral-video viewers. (Say that five times fast.)

• Are progressive teachers being witch-hunted by right-wing goon squads?
• My ol’ hometown is located within one of the most populous U.S. counties that doesn’t have a four-year college. That might change one of these years.
• Guess what? Initiative hawker and professional demagogue Tim Eyman’s behaving just like a lying, homophobic bigot.
• Is ex-Seattleite news anchor Lou Dobbs becoming a “mad prophet of the airwaves,” or is it just a big ratings stunt?
• Will right-wing corporate forces soon try to censor the Internet?
• Tom DeLay–out; the system of coordinated corruption of which he was a cog–still in.
• The ought-six Mariners: Looking pretty good, except for the bullpen.
• Daylight Savings Time is back among us, bringing sunsets after 7:30. Damn, it feels good.

The highly recommended new version of Doctor Who premieres tonight on the SciFi Channel.

MEANWHILE IN PRINTLAND, I’ll have a couple of big announcements next week about a current produce future project. Until then, let’s get caught up with some of the new paper periodicals showing up around town.

Even as the daily-newspaper biz is wreaked by decline and consolidation, slick magazines are suddenly finding financial backing. At one time, almost nobody even tried to charge money for a local mag (except Seattle and Washington CEO). Now there are two new entrants this month alone.

First out of the gate: Seattle Metropolitan. It’s from the pubilshers of Portland Monthly, staffed largely by Seattle Weekly refugees, and promises to be out every damned month.

The premiere issue’s splashy enough, but a bit weak in the enthrallment department.

There’s a laughingly awful “return to elegance” fashion spread, a predictable Charles Cross essay about Beatles nostalgia, and a drab cover hyping a list of the “65 Best Ways to Love Our City.” (I normally like pieces like this, but this one seemed off a bit. Too staid.)

On the plus side, there’s a poignant MIchael Dougan cartoon depicting the spirit of Seattle as a female rock singer who became “America’s darling” at the cost of her soul. And a long but sprightly piece depicts the devolution of Bruce Chapman from political progressive to religious-right demagogue-for-hire.

Yet, for its misses, Seattle Met at least tries to be about something. Its reach exceeds its current grasp, but that’s good.

And that’s more than can usually be said about today’s Seattle magazine, which usually settles for such formula product as “the (insert number here) top (insert upscale profession here) in (insert name of city here).” Seattle recently celebrated what it claimed to be its 40th anniversary. That’s a little specious and a lot convoluted. Let’s try to delineate:

• In 1966, KING-TV founder Dorothy Bullitt helped start Pacific Search, a regional environmental/outdoors newsletter. (Bullitt had also subsidized the first Seattle magazine, which ran from 1964 to 1970.)
• Pacific Search evolved over the years into Pacific Northwest, a slick upscale-lifestyles magazine covering a region defined broadly enough to include large swaths of northern California. Pacific Northwest never really gelled as either an editorial or an ad-sales concept, and stumbled along through the ’80s.
• The Pacific Northwest subscriber list was eventually taken over by a new venture, Seattle Home & Garden. Circa 1993, that was split into two mags, Northwest Home & Garden and the new Seattle. This mini-empire’s now part of the Minnesota-based Tiger Oak Publications.

The above is a brief recap of a complex print-family tree; I ask your advance forgiveness for missing a vital detail here or there. Even in this short form, it’s a more intriguing story than most of what Seattle has run lately.

I’ve got this theory about compelling media content: You’ve gotta have some. It’s not enough anymore to simply identify a wealthy segment of the populace, proclaim yourself to be that segment’s “voice,” and watch the ad bucks roll in. You’ve gotta make readers want you and keep wanting you, despite the plethora of other local and national media choices out there.

Seattle Met, for all its initial failings, gets this. Will Seattle learn it in response? We’ll just have to wait and see.

Elsewhere in the same city, Seattle (Sound) breaks all the rules of local music media established back in the late ’70s by the late, lamented Rocket. Seattle (Sound) is a slick mag, not a newsprint tabloid. It charges a cover price. Because it only comes out every two months, it can’t even pretend to offer complete club listings. It doesn’t devote its cover to an out-of-town superstar act. It includes all genres, from rock to rap to classical.

And it works.

The mag’s presence alone is one big statement to the world: Seattle music’s still here dammit, and it’s stronger and broader than ever.

It treats the entire combined local music sub-scenes as one big community. It dares to define its niche big yet specific–as everyone who’s even peripherally involved with local music of any kind, as a player, a listener, or a behind-the-scenes support person.

Its debut cover story’s another list piece (“Seattle Music: 50 Most Influential”). But, unlike Seattle Met‘s big list piece, Seattle (Sound)‘s list is coherent and consistent, even as it darts from the Seattle Opera to Barsuk Records to up-n’-coming production wizards.

There are a few weak spots in the first issue. (KEXP’s John Richards has remarkably little to say about the local hiphop scene.) But on the whole it’s a great intro to a great new concept. Kudos to everyone at Media Index Publishing Group (publishers of Media Inc., the essential trade mag for the Northwest’s still-struggling audio-visual and ad-production industries).

(Full disclosure: The back page of Seattle (Sound) contains a short, favorable review of a compilation CD I helped curate. More about that next week.)

…to the mellifluous Press Your Luck game show host Peter Tomarken, who’s now joined the show’s producer and announcer in Whammy Heaven.

David Lynch is now evangelizing for Transcendental Meditation.

…data confirm what I’ve always suspected/known–that TV viewers and thinkers are not mutually exclusive sets.

…to the memory of Darren McGavin, the original Kolchak the Night Stalker and daring explorer of (a Hollywood version of) the Seattle Underground.

To fill the scheduling void left by the forthcoming UPN/WB merger, Fox is starting a second network service, tentatively titled “My Network TV.” The first announced shows: Anglophone versions of Mexican novelas! No word whether the new net will appear here.

…today to legendary sportscaster Curt Gowdy, one of the few TV personalities to have had simultaneous gigs on all three oldtime networks, and one of the hardest-working nonathletes in the sports biz. (In September weekends during the ’60s, Gowdy would call a baseball game on Saturday, immediately fly to another city, and call an American Football League game on Sunday.)

• The NBC coverage so far has, as my fave TV critic Aaron Barnhart calls it, “less fluff, more stuff.” Fewer interminable human-interest profiles of the participants, more footage of them participating. They’re even showing the greatest winter sport of them all, curling, live on CNBC! (Too bad NBC’s HDTV transmission can be so spotty at times, due to excess signal compression.)
• The opening festivity was a mishmosh of Cirque du Soleil-esque pomposity and truly heartfelt symbolism, such as when the Olympic flag was carried in by eight women from around the countries (though you had to have watched the CBC telecast to have learned about some of these women’s intense political activism).
• Two-man luge!
• Did I mention lots of curling in the US coverage? (But strangely enough, almost none on CBC, which farmed that part out to Canadian cable channels which we can’t get down here.)
• The downhill ski courses with painted boundaries, which the skiers have to keep from crossing.
• Women’s hockey.
• Women’s speed skating.
• The incredibly complicated (and therefore funner) new figure skating scoring rules.
• Just enough return-from-gruesome-injury moments to keep from overdoing the shtick.
• Non-USA athletes are winning a lot, and we even get to see it.

Blame the Seahawks’ Super Bowl loss on inept (or even crooked) officiating, if you must. Many have, on sports talk radio and online chat boards.

There, fans have been ranting with levels of invective that might make Ann Coulter blush. But the title of a chat room at sqidly.com/seahawks said it cleanly and simply: WE WUZ ROBBED.

Of course, it was really only a professional sports event. A show. A big, spectacular show, one as American as apple pie and Enron. Given the nation’s current overabundance of cynicism, it’s easy to fantasize about corruption in high places everywhere.

But even if the Seahawks didn’t entirely lose on their own accord, does it really matter?

Was the past autumn and winter’s Hawk-hype all that important in the universal big-big picture?

I say yes.

Sure, there were the silly moments within the whole mania. Such as the “Seahawks Mass” held last Friday evening at St. James Cathedral.

Granted, the mass might have been just one more publicity stunt in a fortnight of publicity stunts, a means for local Catholics to get onto some of that God-plus-football media attention. So what if, as one of the priests at the mass was later quoted on the TV news, “I don’t know if God is necessarily a football fan”? It’s still a good excuse to bring the parishioners together on a less-than-somber occasion, to pray that our heroes entertain us without getting too seriously banged up in the process, and perhaps without getting caught performing un-role-model-like behaviors.

On the Friday afternoon before the mass, the whole city seemed abuzz about the game. Bank tellers and checkout clerks dutifully wore team apparel; team flags and banners abounded, especially downtown during and after the big rally in Westlake Center.

But on Sunday afternoon, the place was as quiet and ghost-town-esque as Christmas morning. Everyone, it seemed, was watching the game, working, or finding some alternate activity to deliberately avoid watching the game. The Capitol Hill bar where I’d watched the previous two Super Bowls was particularly calm; it turned out the owners were holding a private party at their suburban home and had invited most of the bar’s regular patrons. When I went wandering outside at halftime, Broadway and Pine was as quiet and devoid of human activity as I’d ever seen it in the daytime.

That’s part of the social dynamic of pro football, particularly as it played out this year in this town.

The Seahawks’ miracle season was played out in huge public gatherings (the home games) and smaller public parties (the sports bars). The two big rallies the week before the game were free celebrations open to all ages, genders, races, and classes.

But the championship game itself was held, as it always is, on (presumably) neutral turf. Its telecasts are often viewed at private parties and semi-private bar events (reservations recommended).

The result: The Seahawks won in public and lost in private. The fans’ cheers were out in the open; their tears were behind closed doors.

And so the conventional wisdom, the national media, and the Vegas oddsmakers were right, and the veteran and newbie members of Seahawk Nation were sent away with a few tart remarks about how we were lucky to have gotten as far in the playoffs as we did.

Seattle can return to being largely forgotten in the NYC press, except as the butt of stale jokes about (as one pro-Seahawks ESPN commentator said in chiding a pro-Pittsburgh ESPN commentator days before the game) “coffee, rain, and Kurt Cobain.”

But the faithful know better. Had a few penalties and refs’ decisions gone the other way, our city would have had the opportunity to party in the streets, shouting our presence to the world.

The Super Bowl telecast opened with a rewritten version of Dr. Seuss’s Oh, The Places You’ll Go! Had our Hawks won, a more appropriate Seuss reading would have been from Horton Hears a Who.
But just wait. One day soon, perhaps this week next year, we’ll get our chance to unite in a rousing cry of “We are here! We are here! We are here!”

Some other pseudo-random thoughts on the game itself, and on the whole show surrounding it:

• After four different commercials with the desperate Bud Light dudes suffering any humiliation just for a beer, I wanted to reach out to them and direct them to the nearest AA meeting.
• What do you know? Mick Jagger can still get his words bleeped at age 62! Either he refuses to go safe and soft, or he’s passed directly from angry young man to bitter old crank without a stop at middle-aged respectability.

Toward the end of last night’s Drinking Liberally meeting, I talked to two ’60s-generation defenders who said protesting could have results. I said protesting wasn’t enough, then eased into my next question: What are leftists today FOR? And I don’t just mean being in favor of being against things. What’s our agenda, beyond stopping the other guys’ agenda? They had no good answers.

With what would we replace the DC culture of corruption? Bush, as everyone who doesn’t watch Fox “News” knows, is merely the transparently incompetent figurehead atop a whole all-encompassing machine of bribery, influence-peddling, warmongering, and the crass exploitation of bigotry and fear. Impeaching Bush alone, or even Bush and Cheney as a team, would only bring new figureheads to deliver the sound bites.

The DLC “centrist” Democrats see no future for the Democratic Party as an organization without corporate money, so they willingly take a donor-chosen role of the all-too-loyal opposition.

The Northwest Democrats and the other progressives around the country? Protesting, marching, sporting angry T-shirts and bumper stickers, staging symbolic acts of dissent like the futile Alito filibuster.

And blogging. And talking at meetups.

At least the bloggers are constantly unearthing and disseminating new damning evidence of the Sleaze Machine’s nefarious actions, and occasionally get the bigtime media to acknowledge this evidence’s existence.

But there’s still damn little discussion on what we’d do instead, aside from not doing most of what the Republicans are doing.

So I ask all of you: Imagine progressive Dems (not just near-right Dems) stand a highly realistic chance of retaking Congress this fall and the White House two falls from now. (I happen to believe this is possible, especially if state-level progressives in certain “battleground states” push through some needed electoral reforms.)

Next, imagine you’re hard at work in some campaign strategy office, trying to make this dream come true. The opinion surveys keep coming back with one public demand: What’s your platform? The kind folk out there in swing-voter-land want to know what you’ll do. Not just what you won’t do, but what you will do.

Now tell us your answers.

…to Charles Herring, Seattle’s and the Northwest’s first TV newscaster (at KING from 1951 to 1967), who passed away this Monday.

Herring’s solid, if square, demeanor helped give the new medium of local TV news a brand of credibility, back in those pre-sound-bite, pre-helicopter days. He’s best known today for his live coverage of the 1962 World’s Fair, preserved on kinescope films and excerpted in many subsequent documentaries.

His final newscast was immediately followed by his appearance in a filmed commercial for White Front, a discount-store chain expanding into the area from California. Herring’s straight-shooting reputation didn’t do much to boost White Front, which folded within six years. (A small subsidiary chain, Toys “R” Us, survived.)

Around the time White Front disappeared, Herring’s son Chuck briefly ran a bookstore on Capitol Hill and self-pubilshed his own essay book, If I Don’t Do This, I’ll Never Do Anything. The “this” the younger Herring was struggling to do? Pubilsh that very book.

The elder Herring ran a mom-and-pop radio station in Port Angeles, then returned to Seattle and worked in Boeing’s industrial-video unit until 1987.