• The LGBT Community Center, which just got its own Capitol Hill building a couple years back, is now in fiscal trouble. It may close by month’s end. Does cultural acceptance of other sexual preferences necessarily lead to assimilation, and in turn to the death of niche-subculture institutions?
• Is Paul Allen getting a “sweetheart deal” from the City in regards to his South Lake Union development projects? Many have rumored such allegations, and now City Councilmember Peter Steinbrueck is vocalizing ’em.
• No, Snohomish cops, UW profs taking industrial-art photographs are not terrotists.
• Microsoft’s shut down a holiday greetings Web page that featured a sometimes foul-mouthed Santa.
• In decades past, private, for-profit lending libraries offered books for rent, sometimes in genres or to audience niches public libraries wouldn’t or couldn’t fully serve. Now, some web entrepreneurs want to bring back the concept, in the form of “a Netflix for books.”
• And, yep, there’s still lotsa flood damage and closed roads and highways throughout Western Washington.

…another blame target for the Floods of ’07: excessive logging.

• As the floodwaters from Rainstorm 2007 still linger, the blame game commences. Was the state laggardly in building Chehalis River flood control systems after allocating money to do so? Does Seattle have an insufficient drainage infrastructure? And, of course, does climate change/global warming have anything to do with all this unseasonably warm rain coming here via the “pineapple express?”
• Jones Soda’s CEO, whose surname (naturally) is Van Stolk, will leave the company at the end of the month. Jones’s massive growth in recent years has come with allegations of financial irregularities at the Seattle-based “boutique soda” marketer.
• Seattle was named #6 on a Brookings Institution list of America’s “most walkable cities.” Portland was #5. Washington DC (Brookings’ home town) made the top spot.
• Seattle Center’s future fate is still undecided, but one legacy building has a new, at least temporary, use. Seattle Opera will stick some staff members and scene storage into Mercer Arena, the former Seattle Ice Arena (home of the 1917 Stanley Cup champions!). The structure, which has also housed rock concerts, the old Seattle Reign women’s basketball team, and many other events, has been idle the past four years.
• The Lake Union streetcar finally has an official opening day. It opens for pubilc rides on Wednesday, Dec. 12. Yes, the clever folks who promoted the unofficial nickname of South Lake Union Trolley, or “SLUT,” promise to be on hand, proudly sporting “Ride the SLUT” T-shirts.
• Amateur film-based photography’s rapid decline hits home. PhotoWorks, formerly Seattle FilmWorks, is selling itself to American Greetings Corp. Seattle FilmWorks was originally a piece of American Passage Marketing, which posted gazillions of ad posters on college campus bulletin boards hawking everything from magazine subscriptions to term paper “research guides.” It originally bought Kodak 35mm movie film, repackaged it for still cameras, and sold it by mail in film-and-processing joint deals.

• 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.

• Seattle’s first snow scare of the season was, as I’d expected, a bust, but here comes another.
• What the P-I calls “affordable-housing developers” (what, you didn’t know there were any of those?) rant that the City of Seattle doesn’t provide enough zoning and other incentives to let ’em profitably build more units for folks closer to “median” income levels. Of course, with the few megarich driving “median” income levels ever higher, the definition of for-profit “affordable” housing inches further away from what working families can afford.
• Meanwhile, Bellevue officials ponder regulations to deal with suburban “megahomes” that flaunt their materialistic corpulence over their neighbors.
• The last of the four Pine-and-Belmont bars has closed prior to condos taking over the half-block. Manray’s demise ends a tradition that goes back nearly 20 years, when Squid Row took over what had been a dive-bar space called Glynn’s Cove. Squid Row begat Tugs Belmont, which begat Kincora. Then came Bimbo’s/Cha Cha, Manray, and the Bus Stop (which begat Pony). The strip’s demise got the expected long mega-coverage in The Stranger; the Cha Cha had been the longtime favorite watering hole of several Stranger staffers.
• The P-I catches on to a story first iterated a year or more, I believe, by the Weekly, that Costco treats its workers nicer than the Wall St. investment community thinks it should, resulting in greater sales and profits. Why, if word of this leaks out, the whole economic excuse for screwing the masses could collapse!
• You don’t have to go to Wash. DC to see Democrats cowering in submission. They’re right here, ramrodding an emergency session of the State Legislature to appease Tim Eyman.

• The giant bowling-pin sign from Leilani Lanes will be saved and put on display, out in rural Snohomish County.
• MS Windows Vista made Cnet.co.uk’s list of the worst tech products ever. Number one on the list: The Sinclair C5, a three-wheeled electric scooter from the creator of the SInclair computer. (I think it looks rather charming myself.)
• The feds won’t demand the names of thousands of Amazon.com book customers after all.
• Mayor Nickels’s office has declared a temporary lull on harassing the homeless.
• How long will it take to get full ferry service to Pt. Townsend again? Maybe a year.
• Seattle no longer has America’s fastest-inflating home prices, losing that dubious spot to Charlotte, NC.
• Keeping one person in prison in Wash. State costs $30,000 to $50,000 a year.

• The Seahawks pulled off a come-from behind miracle victory in St. Louis, cemented when the other team couldn’t score from First and Goal in the last minutes.
• The Seattle Marathon: More profitable and less charitable than you may have thought.
• Do state citizens really suffer from “tax fatigue”? Perhaps not.
• That surplus ferry boat that was gonna be sold on eBay? Not surplus no more.
• Critics accuse software titans of being too mercenary toward little guys caught using file-shared warez.
• Nationally, old-line Southern retro-segregationist Trent Lott will resign from the U.S. Senate; perhaps so he can more quickly join the lobbying biz.
• Despite attempts by an online-retail trade association to promote “Cyber Monday,” the first office day after Thanksgiving’s not yet replacing “Black Friday” in the shopper’s lexicon.
• Besides, Bill Clinton’s treasury sec’y sez recession’s a-headin’ our way.

• It’s the end of the line, sad to say, for onetime Northwest timber giant Pope & Talbot. A court has approved a plan to auction off all of P&T’s remaining assets.
• A Bremerton area woman was arrested for gambling with counterfeit money at the Clearwater Casino. Authorities say she had meth in her purse at the time. Trust me: When you’re sober, those Hell Bank Notes from Chinatown gift shops don’t look a thing like U.S. currency.
• Some of Dino Rossi’s major donors in the 2004 gubernatorial election are backing incumbent Christine Gregoire this time around.
• The Everett Elks Club, the old Mill Town’s predominant social club and nightlife institution for pretty much ever, is being demolished for condos. Once boasting 5,000 members (about a third of the town’s adult male population), it peaked in the ’30s and ’40s, when private clubs in Washington were allowed to have slot machines and were the only places allowed to serve liquor by the drink. I was only in the current Everett Elks building (built in 1962) once, on a father-and-son night. I remember it as a vast, labyrinthine place, with a huge meeting room on the top floor, a male-only “Stag Room” bar and a showroom on the ground floor, and athletic facilities in a series of basements and sub-basements (swimming pool, gym, handball courts). Everything exuded an air of genteel masculunity, albeit toned town to fit the more prole tates of the local community. By that time, though, the Elks had begun their national decline; younger adults were far less interested in joining a group with an official pro-war stance and a white-males-only membership policy.
• And, oh yeah, the Cougs won the 2007 Apple Cup against the Huskies, with a spectacular last-minute touchdown run by the highly appropriately named Alex Brink.

…of nature poets and whale paintings, comes some disrespect toward some vulnerable human lives. A nursing home in Port Townsend wants to kick out old people just because they’re on Medicaid.

…the Cascadia Corridor doesn’t seem like such an island surrounded by hostile waters, as the inland West learns Democrats are cool.

The Times of London has a longer version of the tale we tipped you off to a couple weeks ago, about the guy who sez his late brother was notorious skyjacker D.B. Cooper.

• Protestors almost stopped an Army cargo shipment from the Olympia waterfront to Fort Lewis. You’d think the officials in charge would know better than to sneak anything even peripherally associated with the Iraq war past the turf of Evergreeners….
• An Eastern Washington political scandal that doesn’t involve closeted gays: A newly-elected Republican member of the Yakima city council has admitted his wife posted a bunch of anonymous blog posts bashing the guy’s Democratic opponent.
• Just a week after the Roads n’ Transit referendum’s crash n’ burn, King County’s getting into the foot-ferry business. It’s taking over the Vashon-Seattle passenger-only route from the state, and looking into adding cross-Lake Washington service.
• Meanwhile, the county also planned to raise bus fares a quarter. It’s the first such rise in six years, and it comes just as County Exec Ron Sims is trying harder to push folks onto buses.
• And Gov. Gregoire says she’s taking over responsibility for planning and funding a replacement for the 520 bridge. R n’ T would’ve only funded a piece of the megaproject’s cost anyway.
• In a stunning blow to pundits who’d claimed last week’s local votes showed an anti-tax fervor, the measure to allow future school-funding votes to pass by a simple majority seems to be passing.
• In biz nooze, Redhook Ale Brewery (Seattle’s first microbrewer, dating back to 1982) is fully merging with Portland’s WIdmer Brothers. The combined firm will be based in Portland and maintain both companies’ brands…. Starbucks prepares to issue its latest financial results Thursday, amid questions whether the chain’s lost its way while supermarkets and fast-food chains add better cups o’ Joe…. Amazon.com’s launching an exclusive line of gay and lesbian themed jewelry items; visual motifs weren’t mentioned, but let’s hope they don’t include those ugly saturated-color rainbows.

The longtime state Republican party chief, later an 8th District Congress member for six terms, passed away five days after the passing of her former state Democratic Party counterpart Karen Marchioro. They can now eternally argue policy in Heaven’s most tastefully appointed wine bar.

The longtime state Democratic leader was a heckuva lot more than your proverbial “pioneer woman in a hitherto male dominated field.” She proved herself fully capable of running things, and continued to prove herself for decades. Under her watch, Washington became one of the most progressive, Dem-dominant states in the union. Remember when “moderate” Republicans could get elected governor and senator from here? When an overt wingnut pol like Jack Cunningham could get elected to Congress from south Seattle and Renton? Those days haven’t been with us in a while, and Marchioro’s long service is one reason why.

…that the Virginia Tech shooter, like so many other Deranged Loner Males, was a lifelong victim of bullying who might have been helped by some serious medical attention, and by efforts in the schools to encourage self-respect.

Fleetwood also notes that Washington’s state legislature passed a law to encourage anti-bullying programs in schools, but that it was opposed by Republican legislators. Well, why not? After all, the school bullies of today are the right-wing politicians, executives, and commentators of tomorrow.