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.

…towards one particular Presidential candidate (yeah, I know, 14 months before the general election). And this speech shows why.

Finally, after decades of failed attempts and almost-but-not-quites, there will be a real supermarket in downtown Seattle.

It’ll be an IGA franchise in the lower level of the old Kress variety store at Third and Pike. Vanishing Seattle readers have seen a lovely pic of the soda fountain counter that had been there.

There are now more than 18,000 residents in greater downtown, including more than 10,000 in Belltown/Denny Regrade. But we’ve had to either attain sustenance at convenience stores, deli-marts, the individual small merchants of the Pike Place Market, or out of the neighborhood (lower Queen Anne, Broadway, the International District, or now the Whole Foods at Denny and Westlake).

I love Pike Place, but it ain’t exactly one-stop shopping, and it’s bigger on produce and meat than on packaged goods.

Whole Foods is OK if you shop around for bargains, but it’s not quite an everyday supplier of staples for us non-zillionaires.

Metropolitan Market, Uwajimaya, the Tribeca Building Safeway, and the Uptown QFC aren’t really our ‘hood; going there’s a deliberate shopping adventure, not a quick supply run.

Then there’s the online-ordering-and-delivery solution, available via Safeway, Albertsons, and promised soon from Amazon. That also has its downside–you’ve gotta order a lot to avoid a delivery charge, and you’ve gotta be home during the multi-hour “delivery window.”

So this is a great step forward for those of us who live downtown (and for the 160,000 or so who work or visit downtown each weekday).

The store is set to open in February. I can hardly wait.

One mistake in the P-I story about this: There never was a QFC at “811 Pike Street.” That was a misprint in the Polk City Directory; a QFC was, and is, at 811 East Pike Street.

There were smallish A&P (on Second near James) and Tradewell (at the current Fourth & Pike Rite Aid site) stores in past decades. And there was the Security Public Market in the current Bed Bath & Beyond space at Third and Virginia; like Pike Place, that was a sort of grocery mall in which each department was individually owned and operated.

Mayor Nickels now wants to ensure that Seattle “industrial” areas remain preserved for industry, after previously appearing to support condo/offices/retail development on every tract of land not reserved for single-family homes.

Let’s hope the scheme succeeds. We could use living-wage jobs. And as a community we need the connection to physical-level reality we get when more of us are involved in making physical, tangible things. This is especially vital as more and more of America’s stuff-making capacity is transferred to low-wage countries.

Let’s just stay vigilant about the definition of zoning-official “industrial” activity.

Software offices are not industrial.

Biotech offices are not industrial.

(And for that matter, architectural offices are not “artist spaces.”)

The founder of New York’s legendary punk club CBGB and OMFUG outlived his beloved garage-rock palace by one year. In the often mercenary milieu of NYC showbiz, Kristal was an accidental kingmaker. He’d opened his Bowery bar in 1973, expecting to book nice late-hippie fare (the name stood for “Country Bluegrass Blues and Other Music for Uplifting Gourmandizers”). Instead, he booked the new raucous rock acts then congregating in lower Manhattan’s (at the time) low-rent districts. Many of them became worldwide legends (Ramones, Talking Heads, Blondie, Patti Smith). Others became cult idols (Richard Hell, Wayne County, Television).

While CBGB’s initial stars became too big for the place, and its subsequent regulars never quite hit it big (remember the Shirts?), the “Home of Underground Rock” remained a constant for more than three decades. The New Yorker once called it “the ultimate garage–the place to which garage bands everywhere aspire.”

…without the “writers’ embellishments,” but now it’s a total scream. It’s Effin’ Unsound’s annotated Bush in Bellevue speech.

…about the latest Republican closet-case scandal, that of Idaho Senator Larry Craig getting busted for lewd conduct in a Minneapolis airport men’s room: TBogg’s “Boys Will Be Boise.”

YouTube’s finally gonna have ads on its video pages. But they’ll only be on professionally-produced content by “partner” companies. The ol’ user-submitted videos apparently aren’t slick enough, or attract the right precision demographics, for sponsors to care about.

Today’s piece is long and goes all over the place. Consider yourselves warned.

Steven Brant is one of the many commentators who’ve noted the dangerous link between the Bushies’ I-can-do-any-goddamn-thing-I-want sense of privilege and the corporate-motivation side of new age create-your-own-reality philosophy, as particularly realized in the soon-to-end reign of Alberto Gonzales–a tenure which fellow pundit Greg Palast calls “Wrong and Illegal and Unethical.”

By Brant’s line of reasoning, the right-wing sleaze machine has spent the past seven years determined that it can get everything it wants just by believing in it really hard (and, of course, by hustling and dirty tricks and corruption and torture and favors etc.); but cruel reality is increasingly catching up with their fantasies.

I’m getting less sure about this interpretation.

First of all, the GOPpers have remained “successful” at their prime goals–to concentrate wealth upward, to swap favors with the insurance, drug, oil, and weapons industries (even at the expense of the economy as a whole), to turn the entire federal government (with the recent exception of Congress) into an operating subsidiary of the Republican campaign operation, to rig the election process by hook or by crook, to reward friends and punish enemies, to promote a more authoritarian society at home and imperial ventures abroad.

The administration’s simply failed at tasks to which its devotions are shallower–democracy, security, justice, public health, education, economic prosperity beyond the ruling class, and the whole basic spectrum of good-guy goals America used to claim to care about.

But that leads to another question. If us “reality based” progressives are gonna pooh-pooh the right’s positive-thinking shtick, how do we account for the right’s success at so many of its real goals–particularly the goal of persuading and keeping loyal dittohead voters?

This is where a few recent books come in.

The first is Drew Westen’s The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation.

Westen (no relation to ABC News execs Av and David Westin, or to Westin Hotels) argues that the right’s policies may have had a near-totally negative impact on the body politic’s health, but its public messages have been cleverly crafted for optimal emotional impact. Those emotions could be sunny, or fearful, or bigoted, depending on the particular audience “buttons” needing to be pushed; but they were always effectively presented.

Us left-O-centers, in contrast, have had a lousy rep for left-brain, policy-wonk talk that resonates with nobody except ourselves; or for downer everything’s-hopeless cynicism; or for mealy-mouthed, middle-of-the-road wussiness.

To change this sorry state-O-affairs, Westen sez Dems have to show up with some emotionally compelling narratives of their own, and to fearlessly shout ’em out.

This notion coincides with the premise of Chip and Dan Heath’s new marketing guidebook, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.

The Heath brothers seldom mention politics in their book, save for lauding JFK’s “Man on the Moon” speech. Their main target is the business person looking for a way to connect with potential customers.

But their premise, if it works to sell shoes and burgers, would also work to sell policies and politicians.

That premise: Ideas that spread, that “hit” with audiences, all employ six key ingredients: “simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotions, and stories,” in various amounts.

Let’s explore how these principles might work in a marketing drive whose “product” is progressive-Dem candidates for public office:

• 
  Simplicity: Have the wonky details of our plans available online and in print. But have clear, memorable goals and promises in front of them. Defuse the Mideast powder keg. Get our troops home safe n’ sound. Health care for all. Back to balanced budgets.
• 
  Unexpectedness: Voters and pundits may expect another play-it-safe, make-no-waves Dem campaign, vetted by consultants and triangulated for minimum offensiveness. Let’s pleasantly shock ’em with some real passion and guts.
• 
  Concreteness: A budget-deficit cut by X each year. A Medicare-like health card in every wallet. A proud homecoming for our sons n’ daughters from Iraq.
• 
  Credibility: Have the wonk-data ready. But also show the resolve to get these policies up and running.
• 
  Emotions: Where there was fear, there will be hope. Where there was hatred, there will be compassion. Where there was blind ambition, there will be cooperation. Where there was spoiled privilege, there will be responsibility.
• 
  Stories: Life’s been tough. Ordinary folks struggled to get by; while the few at the top kept acting greedier and stupider. A gang of thieves has ripped up the Constitution as well as the social fabric.But, together, we can turn it around. America can mean something again.

P.S.: Yesterday’s electronic town hall by progressive heroine and Congressional candidate Darcy Burner had a few technical glitches (the video stream went down a couple of times). But it was a fundraising smash. Burner raised over $100,000 from nearly 3,000 contributors before and during the event, which got great write-ups on the national political blogs.

The puppet ruler of a once-great nation is on the Eastside today, for a completely inside-the-bubble, zillionaires-only fundraising junket on behalf of Rep. Dave Reichert and the state Republican Party.

The good news: Reichert’s once and future election opponent, the courageous and totally on-the-bean Darcy Burner, is hosting an “online town hall” this same day, at 3 PM PDT. Be there.

I first visited the Pike Place Market in 1975. More than three years after city residents voted to “Save the Market,” the big renovation/restoration was still underway. Much of the South Arcade was boarded up, with “artistic” grafitti and murals painted on the plywood barriers. One board bore the simple message: DON’T FIX IT UP TOO MUCH–SAVE THE MARKET.

The Market voters had “saved” was a homey, funky, rundown warren of stands and shops, a place of proletarian dreams and honest hard work. The fixed-up Market maintained this look, even as the surrounding First Avenue sleaze district shrank.

As the years passed, it became a mecca for civic self-congratulation. More merchants geared themselves to tourists, using such gimmicks as the infamous fish throwers. Luxury car dealerships shot magazine ads along Pike Place (“No Ordinary Supermarket, No Ordinary Car”).

New York financiers, supposedly “silent” investors in the Market’s real estate, suddenly claimed ownership. The city fought ’em and won. The city argued the financiers intended to “fix it up too much,” destroying the Market’s soul for the sake of upscale retail revenues.
Now, it seems the city bureaucrats running the Market might just be “fixing it up too much” on their own. Some of the powers-that-be want to promote the place as the ultimate high-end retail destination for the condo crowd.

I say the Market’s role as “the soul of Seattle” is more vital than competing against Whole Foods.

Sure, sell fancy stuff. But still sell the basics. Make the place a refuge for products downtown people need but high-end retail doesn’t offer.

And Keep It Funky, God.

Gay, piercing fan, cock ring wearer.

I watched the Disney Channel produciton High School Musical 2, the most hyped entertainment event on cable TV since the CNN/YouTube Presidential debate. The frothy, bombastic, hyper-squeaky-clean TV movie bears only a passing resemblance to the corny but human-scale live-action Disney sitcom movies of my own youth.

At minute 41, the precise difference hit me: This is a Bollywood movie that happened to have been made in Hollywood (well, actually filmed in Utah). All your Mumbai-musical elements are there–the gleeful overacting, the sudden breaking into song-and-dance at unpredictable intervals, the almost-but-not-quite-kissing moves in the flirtation dances, the overwrought farce, the family/tribal bonding elements, and especially the X-treme “wholesomeness” turned up to fetish/kink levels.

Elsewhere in East-Meets-West-land, I present the absolute weirdest thing South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone have ever made. It’s a series of totally-sincere online animation shorts, done in standard SP style, based on brief snippets of speeches by the late philosopher/guru Alan Watts. Really.

A male Cinerama employee was accused earlier this week of hiding a video camcorder in the theater’s women’s room.

Reports of this same crime have occurred earlier this year in other cities. At those times, bloggers/pundits (all female) asked out loud why the hell any guy could get off on the sight of a woman on a toilet.

I myself asked the same question out loud in 1999, when Penthouse magazine, in the last years of founder Bob Guccione’s direction, briefly featured professionally-posed pictorials of women urinating.

Such scenes never turned me on. But I tried to figure why anyone else would be.

As best as I could guess, I deduced it must have been something about viewing a woman at a moment when her public persona is as “down” as her slacks.

Sometime circa 2003, I read something by former porn-biz blogger Luke Ford about a porn producer who’d reported some stolen videotape masters or something like that. After the pilf was recovered, a police detective made arrangements to personally deliver it back to the producer. During the handover, the cop said he’d always wanted to meet the porn producer. The cop said he particularly loved XXX videos for the occasional moment when a leading lady, in the peak of passion, would drop all feminine pretense and reveal pure, un-acted emotion.

That moment, I guess, is what toilet fetishists also seek.

But there’s no need to degrade yourself into committing criminal acts in order to play out this fetish (or any other).

In the Internet age, porno images of every kink can be attained quickly and cheaply. Many are created by trained professionals, with unobstructed camera angles and adequate lighting, featuring models who are not only aware and willing but even paid for the job of entertaining you.

“Stillwell” reminds us that Karl Rove may be gone (for now), but plenty of other right-wing thugs are still around to do his work for him.