Wash. state’s still got America’s most regressive tax system.

And nobody this year seems to be even trying to do anything about it.

In gender income equality, Wash. state ranks 48th out of the 50 states plus D.C.:

The median weekly earnings for full-time and salaried women was $743 compared to $997 in median weekly earnings for men.

Two potential reasons: vastly overpaid tech CEOs, and the relative paucity of women in tech careers.

via imcdb.org

• What was that car in that movie? There’s an online database for that.
• As we patiently await the NBA owners’ vote that will likely bring back the Sonics, there’s word of a hockey team that may be in need of a buyer and/or new home. Seattle, alas, doesn’t have an NHL-ready space. The hockey configuration of KeyArena is too small and awkward. Until a new arena’s built, the closest thing we’ve got is the Tacoma Dome, whose ice-making gear was removed and would need replacing.
• City Councilmember Jean Godden vividly explains why we cannot, dare not, return to the bad old days before legal abortion.
• A homeless camp in Bremerton was shut down after five years.
• Charles Mudede finds sublime meaning in Macklemore’s “Thrift Store” rap.
• KOMO has kind words for Jet City Stream, the new all-local online radio station.
• The recently-deceased dad of local music-scene vet Ben London was an innovative avant-garde composer.
• One of those online coupon dot-coms doubled its sales and still lost over half a billion.
• The return of vinyl has inevitably led into the return of cassette-only music releases and evrn cassette-only labels.
• Zoe Triska at Huff Post really hates classic novels with inappropriate, “commercial” covers tacked on, especially when they’re aimed at teen girls:

ap via nwcn.com

• Just like at the Ballard Locks, Oregon’s Willamette Falls is plagued by salmon-hungry sea lions. Local officials’ answer? “A boat crew armed with seal bombs and shotguns loaded with firecrackers.”
• A Seattle Times headline labels “art” as a waste of state taxpayer money, right up there with legislators’ dry-cleaning bills. This is not the sort of objective reporting of which the Times claims to be a last bastion.
• You want real spending waste, in a project about, well, waste? Then look no further than Seattle Public Utilities’ new south end transfer station, still not ready months after its ribbon cutting.
• Another stupid shooting in another local nightspot. How utterly gross. (Here’s news of the benefit for the bar bouncer’s recovery.)
• I seem to have found out about this story in progress, but the UW’s Women’s Action Commission has created its own theater piece in the tradition of The Vagina Monologues. Only this all-new work is called The ___ Monologues. The title is apparently an attempt to make the work “more trans-friendly.”
• The Yankees don’t like A-Rod anymore.
• Marijuana industry trade associations are now a thing.
• The Wall St. Journal says Microsoft wouldn’t have to take a majority stake in Dell in order to have  a pivotal degree of influence in the beleagured PC maker.
• The newest version of MS Office comes in a “cloud based” subscription version, which seems to essentially require you to have a never-interrupted Net connection (and, of course, to keep paying).
• Boeing’s global-outsourcing craze is now, more or less officially, a “disaster.”
• We must say goodbye to Regretsy, the site that pokes gentle fun at kooky craft products. Its operator April Winchell (yes, Dick Dastardly’s daughter) said the site’s concept had run its course (“now we’re just Bedazzling a dead horse”).
• Last week, Twitter launched a new streaming-video site called Vine. The premise is people posting six-second, repeating GIF videos. Yes, it’s already been used for porn, and for people taping themselves taking bong hits.
• Barnes & Noble plans to close perhaps 20 percent of its stores over the next decade. So much for the guys who were supposed to be taking over the industry and driving all the indie quirkiness out of the book biz.
• Someone’s written a long, detailed critique of the cinematography in Les Miserables—in the character of the Incredible Hulk.
• “Rei” at Daily Kos wants you to reconsider the Fox News story from last week about Iceland’s official baby-names list.
• Speaking of which, while my masses-bashing “radical” leftist friends like to imagine Fox News as “the most popular TV channel,” its ratings among adults under 55 are the lowest they’ve been in more than a decade.
• Jeb Boniakowski at The Awl would like a mega-McDonald’s in NYC’s Times Square, that would serve everything the chain serves everywhere else but not in this country.
• Public radio’s idea of “humor,” at once bland and cloying, reaches a new nadir in a Chicago station’s make-believe plea for its listeners to breed more public-radio-listening babies.
• Headline: “Ex-NFL player charged with beating boyfriend.” Comment: Yes, this is still what it takes to acknowledge the existence of gay athletes.
• Jim Nabors had been rumored to be gay ever since his days of sitcom stardom. Now he’s finally publicly proclaimed it, by getting married in Seattle.
• The NY Times has discovered something that’s been going on around here for some time—the “permanent temp” economy.
• One of the last of its kind in the region, the Valley 6 Drive-In Theater in Auburn, will not reopen after its most recent seasonal shutdown. Even sadder, its longtime manager Kieth Kiehl passed on shortly after the decision to close was made. Both will be missed.

beth dorenkamp via grindhouse theater tacoma

chris lynch, seattlest (2010)

Seattle Weekly now has new owners and a new office in Pioneer Square, not far from where the paper had begun way back in ’75.

And it’s going to have a new publisher and a new editor. Those guys announced their respective departures just after Sound Publishing took over the title.

I’ve sent in my application to be the Weekly‘s next editor.

I told them they shouldn’t consider me if they just wanted someone to supervise more shrinkage, with the occasional formal nod to “social media” and online platforms.

But if they wanted someone who would fight to make the Weekly matter to this city again, I’d be their person.

David Brewster’s original Weekly team vowed to bring us, as one of their ad slogans put it, “the news that actually matters.”

That goal can be revived.

The Weekly can be a lot more than just another freebie collection of entertainment listings and medical-pot ads.

It can be the “grownup” alternative to the Stranger; the seriously progressive alternative to the Seattle Times; the street-wise alternative to KUOW.

Think of the pre-cutback versions of Willamette Week and the NY Observer. Papers that treated their entire cities, and everything that occurred within them, as their “beat.”

Imagine a news/opinion organization that makes the right kind of noise, that afflicts the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, that answers the questions and questions the answers.

Not just another formulaic “alt weekly” but a full service forum where anything can be discussed and there’s always something new.

That’s what I want to help create.

It would be far easier to create that entity from the Weekly‘s existing staff, circulation, and ad accounts.

But if not, then a startup.

People ask what I want to really do with my life. That’s it.

steve bloom, the olympian via seattlepi.com

No. Though that hasn’t stopped the making of unofficial “WE’RE BACK” T-shirts (see above).

And it looks like the Sacramento city fathers appear to be having a hard time finding enough local money to make a viable competing bid for the Kings franchise.

Art Thiel speculates, though, that one such potential “whale” could be Oracle boss Larry Ellison. Ellison may also want to move the team, but only as far as San Jose. (Cue the Dionne Warwick jokes in five… four…)

Still, Seth Kolloen insists that “barring some unforeseen circumstance, the Kings will play here as the Sonics this fall.”

One of Mike Seely’s last tasks at Seattle Weekly is a speculative piece wondering if the neo-Sonics could field an all-Seattle-connected team (ex-Sonics, ex-Huskies, and local high school grads).

Meanwhile, now that the National Hockey League has come back from the dead (again), there’s talk that, instead of moving a failing Sunbelt team, the league could put an expansion franchise into Quebec City and maybe Seattle, or maybe Quebec and the Toronto suburbs. (Considering how the Toronto Maple Leafs have spent more than four decades fielding cheapskate teams, with team management sitting all fat and cozy in the sport’s largest market, a second team there would be intriguing. But not at Seattle’s expense, please.)

the aurora kmart in 2002

• Seattle’s last Kmart store, at 130th and Aurora, has lost its lease and is closing. It first opened in 1968 as a branch of White Front, the long-defunct California chain that begat Toys “R” Us.
• Daniel B. Wood at the Christian Science Monitor asks whether Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner is “too high-tech for its own good.”
• Do we want the Arboretum’s “ramps to nowhere,” the only surviving legacy of the rightfully-halted R.H. Thompson Expressway project of the early 1970s, to be removed? I say no.
• Could legal “pirate” (quasi-unlicensed) radio be coming to Seattle?
• How to guarantee a huge turnout at a city hearing: make it about making the rules for legal pot sales.
• R.I.P. Mary Shirley, who with her ex- Microsoft exec hubby was a major art collector and Seattle Art Museum donor.
• Local blue-eyed-rap star Macklemore has one devout anti-fan in Brandon Sodenberg (“safe-as-fuck, liberal meme-rap”).
• In case you’d forgotten, the Chihuly Museum people promised a kids’ playground and a gallery space for other Northwest artists, in exchange for taking up a huge chunk of Seattle Center land. Neither is anywhere in sight.
• In “boring” news, the big waterfront tunnel digging machine got some small but significant damage during testing in Japan.
• Janie Stilgoe at The Guardian says the days of “content” web sites scrambling to game Google’s search results through “search engine optimization” are over. Google’s revamped its algorithms specifically to discourage it. Instead, Stilgoe says web sites (including news sites) should embrace “content marketing,” whatever that is.
• And let’s end it for today with a scenic tour past some “Faded Motels of the Rust Belt.”

via huffington post

No, and there’s supposedly some potential legal maneuver by some Sacramento Kings minority owners that could potentially disrupt the deal, supposedly.

Sports Illustrated, meanwhile, has some classic photos of the classic Sonics (see above), as we await what could be the team’s return.

And Knute Burger believes the latest potential Sonics arena design looks like a Jell-O mold. Hey: Let’s get some of the designers and artists who lived at Seattle’s original Jell-O mold building (the S.C.U.D. artist apartments on Western, where the original Cyclops restaurant was), to help design the new arena. That place housed the likes of Art Chantry (designer of countless band posters and my book Loser), Louie Raffloer (Black Dog Forge), Ashleigh Talbot (Madame Talbot’s Victorian Lowbrow), and several more.

via sportspressnw.com

No. And probably not for three more months (when the NBA’s team owners will probably vote on Chris Hansen buying nad moving the Sacramento Kings). But yesterday’s announcement that a tentative deal was in place led to a lot of unofficial celebration and chatter. Art Thiel describes the potential return of NBA basketball as a “guilty pleasure,” evoking “painful memories” of the original Sonics’ theft in 2008:

In a year or two, a relative few in this market are likely to remember that the team in green and gold used to be the Sacramento Kings. But for some of us, it will be equally hard to forget those thousands outside Seattle’s federal courthouse in the summer of 2008, reduced to helpless chanting in order to save a passion.

Seth Kolloen at The SunBreak looks back at the past five Sonics-less years and wonders if they’ll even be remembered, while he looks forward to the hoops-mania to come:

In the next few weeks, you may notice strange behaviors from local sports fans — penciling out season ticket budgets on envelopes, suddenly taking an interest in a confused 22-year-old named DeMarcus Cousins, standing wordlessly and worshipfully outside KeyArena. Our minds are in the future now too, instead of the past. In about nine months, we’ll be proud hoops parents.

kentaro lemoto @tokyo, via daily kos

• Hey McDonnell Douglas Boeing, how’s that whole foreign outsourcing thing working for ya?
• Add to the endlessly growing list of cool places disappearing: the Alki Tavern, where bikers once held drunken brawls in front of a spectacular Elliott Bay view. Yep, the real estate’s going for luxury condos. Damn.
• Already gone before we could say goodbye: Costa’s Opa, Fremont’s anchor Greek eatery for 32 years. The villain in this story is the same as the one in the Queen Anne Easy Street Records disappearance: unChaste Bank.
• The NY Times has officially “discovered” Pike/Pine. Does that mean the place is, you know, “over”?
• City bureaucrats still don’t want meals for the homeless to be served, you know, where the homeless are.
• There might be nothing sicker, and sadder, than allegations of sexual harassment at King County’s sex crimes unit.
• Not every Catholic priest does horrible things to boys. At least one’s been caught dealing meth and having sex with (adult) cross-dressers.
• Atari has faced “Game Over” before. But this time, its fate is in the hands of obscure holding companies and hedge funds.
• Last week’s Saturday Night Live tribute to the tropes of (clothed dialogue scenes in) ’70s softcore movies definitely qualifies as a “10 to 1” sketch, the edgier or just odd stuff often snuck in at the show’s end.

getty images/otto greule jr. via seattlepi.com

No. There are still bureaucratic approvals to be gotten.

But we’re closer than we ever were!

On a morning dominated by national political pomp n’ circumstance, when the local TV stations were locked into network coverage (KIRO-TV couldn’t get to it until 1:35 p.m.), when only sports-talk radio, web sites, and “social media” could immediately spread the word, Chris Hansen issued an announcement:

We are happy to announce that we have entered into a binding agreement with the Maloofs to purchase a controlling interest in the Sacramento Kings NBA franchise. The sale is obviously subject to approval by the NBA Board of Governors, and we look forward to working with the League in the coming months to consummate the transaction.

While we are not at liberty to discuss the terms of the transaction or our plans for the franchise given the confidential nature of the agreement and NBA regulations regarding public comments during a pending transaction, we would just like to extend our sincerest compliments and gratitude toward the Maloof family. Our negotiations with the family were handled with the utmost honor and professionalism and we hope to continue their legacy and be great stewards of this NBA franchise in the coming years and decades.

The sale, and the move, still have to be approved by the league’s Board of Governors (the other team owners). A Seattle Times online story says that could happen in mid-April and would likely “win overwhelming approval.”

NBCSports.com blogger Aaron Bruski says Sacramento interests will have six weeks to make a firm counter-offer; but Bruski believes they haven’t much of a chance.

Meanwhile, the Times‘ Steve Kelley asks,

What’s the rule on number of exclamation points allowed in a column?

Why is the Hallelujah Chorus playing in my head?

Our ol’ pal Goldy says the potential move is a “big win” for Mayor Mike McGinn.

And KJR-AM’s site bears the premature, but understandable, banner GOT ‘EM BACK!

…But enough for now about the Sonics announcement (more on that to come).

via huffington post

We now have a president, at the height of his power, who has spoken in favor of gay rights, economic fairness, peace, and climate action at the single most public forum available to him.

I know my “radical” friends carp, and always will carp, that Obama isn’t nearly half as progressive as they’d like.

But real-world politics isn’t about a hierarchy of sanctimony. It’s about getting real stuff done, overcoming real obstacles. And right now, this president and this Democratic Party are our best vehicles for that.

No.

But NBA Commissioner David Stern has finally publicly talked about the possibility. He says no proposed sale of the Sacramento Kings to would-be team mover Chris Hansen has officially crossed his desk, and that Sacramento interests will have one last chance to buy and keep the team. That counter-offer may be presented as early as one week from today.

igor keller at hideousbelltown.blogspot.com

• The Sixth Avenue Motor Inn and the King Cat (née King) Theater are coming down, in preparation for the three Amazon high rises (each of which will be as tall as the ex-Seafirst tower).
• I’d rather be on a non smoking flight, thank you. (But in all seriousness, would the pre-McDonnell-Douglas Boeing have let planes go into service with untested battery technologies?)
• The Queen Anne branch of Easy Street Records is still closing on Friday. But in happier news, Queen Anne Books is reopening under new management.
• Seattle Weekly editor Mike Seely quits just as new, perhaps more competent, owners take over.
• An Everett woman “is accused of smothering her boyfriend by lying on his face.” With her chest.
• One reason to get an iPhone instead of something else: Facebook’s free-voice-calls app.
• Nagisa Oshima, R.I.P.: Japan’s government should honor the filmmaker’s memory by finally allowing his masterwork, In the Realm of the Senses, to be screened uncut in his country.
• Abigail Van Buren, R.I.P.: Pauline Phillips, one of the advice-column twins (Eppie Lederer, a.ka. “Ann Landers,” was her sister), carved out a niche in daily newspapers back when such institutions still had many such niches to be filled. Her common-sense, yet witty, responses to readers’ personal issues kept readers enthralled, and subscribed, for more than three decades. Speaking of deceased twins…
• Conrad Bain, R.I.P.: My favorite of his performances was when Maude ran a “twins” episode, a common sitcom shtick. In the big closing reveal, both characters walked out, in front of the studio audience in an obviously unfaked shot. Turned out Bain really had a twin, Bonar Bain, who still lives. (Bonar later appeared as himself, albeit renamed “Fred Bain,” on SCTV.)
• No, Washington Post: People’s Twitter pictures are not free for the (unpaid) republishing.
• Markos Moulitsas claims today’s Democrats, popularity-wise, “may now be on the right side of every single relevant issue.”
• Punch, the late beloved UK humor mag, knew the addictive power of mobile electronic-media devices before they even existed:

via kip w on flickr

and nope, not *this* kind of sonic either.

No.

Though the rumor mill keeps a-grindin’ with word that Chris Hansen’s plan buy and move the Sacramento Kings has been submitted to the NBA’s Relocation Committee.

When, you might ask, would I answer the title question above with a “yes”?

When a sale and move, or a plan for a sale and move, has been publicly announced; then when such a two-part plan has been approved by the league’s Board of Governors (a.k.a. all the other team owners).

Until then, this department might not appear each day; only when there’s something to be said (seriously or otherwise) about the topic.