The Seattle Times--almost coming right out and saying something without regard for nuance and subtlety--has decided to set the facts straight about that Washington state deficit the Dino-Rossi-for-Gov ads are whacking Gov Gregoire over the head with. "The ads assert the state has a deficit. [...] The ad is inaccurate for this reason: The state is facing a projected $3.2 billion budget hole next year, but it does not have a deficit today." In fact,......

We've been so nervous about what's going to happen to our local savings and loan, Washington Mutual. And then today, we hear that you're thinking of just pulling more billions of dollars out of nowhere (Why not? The nation's already in severe debt!) to cover the debts of our failing financial institutions. While you're at it, could you also pay off our debts? You can start with our student loans, since the money is actually......

We know how bad this whole crashing economy is. Really, we do. But every cloud has a silver lining, and we're pretty sure the sparkle you can see just past today's bankrupt financial giants and tanked WAMU stock is increased transit ridership translating into more routes and added runs on existing routes so you don't have to drive (or pay for gas) anymore. With ridership nearly 7 percent higher than this time last year, King......

Seattlest just got our stimulus check from the government—cha-ching!—and we're looking for ways to spend it that don't involve just handing it over to the oil companies. We thought we'd share some ideas: 1) A new tattoo. Recommendations for artists and studios are very welcome in the comments. 2) Gifts for Mom. Sunday is Mother's Day, and our mother is in the opposite part of the country. It would've been cool of us to surprise......

"Denny Triangle And First Hill" by Ryan Hadley A 13-acre, $600 million property in the Denny Triangle has been pulled back off the markets for now, thanks to an unfavorable debt economy thwarting similar development deals across the country. According to the Wall Street Journal, the development of the Clise family-owned property was meant to catapult a $7 billion project in downtown Seattle and revitalize the area over the next twenty years. Apparently, the......

What does the Noo Yawk Effing Times have against Seattle? Frank Bruni, their restaurant critic, puts together a list of ten hot new restaurants around the country. Geographic balance, gotta find one in the Pacific Northwest, let's see: green corner of the country, organic is hot, women chefs are hot, anything fit the bill? Wow! A two-fer, right in Seattle: Tilth, all green and a woman at the stove to boot. They send Matt......

The mass insanity of the housing bubble over the last few years has pretty fully revealed itself by now. One need only visit our good friends over at Seattle Bubble to read about the increasing devastation. On Jan. 15, Tim posted the big news: according to the Northwest Multiple Listing Service (NWMLS), King Co. finally posted negative year-over-year median closing prices on housing. According to the same report, active listings are up in the YOY......

Dennis McLerran, head of the Puget Sound Clean Air Agency is "pissed." Governor Schwarzenegger is suing federal regulators. According to more than 500 news articles, The Environmental Protection Agency denied California’s bill to place limitations on vehicle emissions, which would have cut greenhouse-gas emissions by 30 percent in the next 10 years. McLerran claims in a Seattle Times article the EPA’s decision is purely political, not factual. Washington was one of the 18 states that......

If you were here right now, you'd see us looking around suspiciously like we don't quite trust we're awake because we just read Knute Berger's latest deep thought over at Crosscut and we...agree with him.While promoting green consumption might be politically more palatable than getting people to change their habits and expectations, promoting consumption still offers an answer that doesn't solve the bigger problem. Global warming's hawks have to be honest with us: Fighting the......

Are you a seasoned editor with online media know-how, management experience, a passion for the news, and an appreciation for life's absurdities? If so, Grist may be the place for you.... Grist.org is the country’s leading online source of environmental news and analysis, reporting daily on the events, issues, people, and trends that affect our planet. We shape the nation’s conversation around all things green, educating, informing, inspiring -- and eliciting guffaws -- from our......

When we sat down to do our endorsements we reached a disturbing conclusion. We cannot, in good conscience, vote for anyone. Position 1 Jean Godden: Wrote for the Seattle Times when it endorsed Bush in 2000. Joe Szwaja: Involved in a 1990 domestic dispute in which his then-girlfriend threw a bottle at him and he threw a plate at her. Position 3 Bruce Harrell: Doesn't spend enough time with his 15-year-old son from a previous......

Click-YAY! Click-YAY! Click-YAY! That's the Call of the Amazonian today. Amazon.com stock closed up 10%, at 100.96, after the company announced profits have quadrupled. It's not just well-wishers that are buying in on the stock, it's also panicked short-sellers. There's a 36.8 million share short interest that comes due at the end of September, and those who own a big or even small part of it are buying now so they don't lose their shirts.......

Peter Steinbrueck, a soon-to-be--former City Council member, announced legislation today that would require all city departments that review the environmental impacts of projects to take greenhouse gas emissions into account. Besides the fact that it's kind of crazy that they don't already do that, we think this is a great idea. It's great because it's an attempt to take into account and limit all of those emissions that are usually ignored as too hard to......

Initially, we were a little surprised to hear that ACT--A Contemporary Theatre--was putting on Clare Booth Luce's The Women. Although having debuted in 1936 placed the play in the Modern canon, its view of women is about as un-p.c. as they come: in short, the play presents women as gossipy and back-stabbing, assumes marital infidelity is a function of the Y chromosome, and ends with a note suggesting that for the sake of a healthy......

Everyone is jumping on the reunion tour bandwagon these days, and the paleontologists greedy museum directors of the world are not to be left out of the mix. Lucy, the famous (if you prefer science over Hollywood) 3.2-million-year-old fossil, is going on tour too. She's got some contentious bones. The original set of fossils--representing the oldest, most intact human ancestor--has been swept out of Ethiopia, where she was supposed to stay in perpetuity, and is......

There are all sorts of things a Port could do. But what should its focus be? Back when Seattle was prouder to be known as a blue-collar shipping hub, cargo containers lining the horizon, the Port used its property tax dollars to encourage things like rail transportation. Looking over our absentee ballot for this August's primary elections, we wonder what the criteria should be for choosing between people running for Port Commissioner. In thinking about......

The food news may seem depressing, but there's hope. Bear with us. In 1651, Thomas Hobbes, not known for his optimism, wrote that the life of man was doomed to be nasty, brutish, and short. Couple hundred years later, the even less-cheery Thomas Malthus predicted that the Industrial Revolution would cause worldwide famine. Yet humans survive, even prosper. Oh, sure, we waste resources fighting one another. Granted, too, that political systems everywhere seem to encourage......

Save Our Sonics and Citizens For More Important Things' Chris Van Dyk are working together to keep NBA basketball in the city…until 2010. Owner Clay Bennett is going to try and move the team to Oklahoma City at the end of the season, even though the team has a lease with the city that runs through 2010. Bennett could buy his way out of the lease; a prospect that the city may like considering that......

Ding dong NASCAR's dead. The ISC came a'knocking with promises of garbage bags full of tourist's cash if only the state legislators would agree to a tax-payer-funded track on the Peninsula. It seemed like kind of a longshot from the beginning, and NASCAR's local guys failed spectacularly at judging the state of things in the Puget Sound region. "Hey, guys, they just voted down a tax-funded basketball venue and it looks like they're gathering in......

Monday WOMEN & MONEY: Personal finance expert and author, Suze Orman talks about the complicated and dysfunctional relationship that women have with money in her book, Women & Money: Owning the Power to Control Your Destiny. 7:30pm // Town Hall // $5 AGORAPHOBES TAKE HEART: Everything you’ve been told about dating is wrong. Love Will Find You is a new approach to love from dating expert Kathryn Alice. It may be the first dating......

Air France is announcing daily direct flights from Seattle to Paris today, beginning June 11. Wow, just in time for that early summer get-away we've been trying to plan. The Port's email release focuses more on Parisians coming to Seattle, of course: “Having a non-stop flight is likely to bring new European travelers into our market and into our economy.” said Visitors Bureau CEO Don Welsh “Leisure travelers from France typically spend about two weeks......

Monday AUTHOR, AUTHOR: Dr. Neal Barnard has his self-promotional finger on America's pulse with his book: Dr. Neal Barnard's Program for Reversing Diabetes: The Scientifically Proven System for Reversing Diabetes Without Drugs. Is a low-fat vegetarian diet in your future? 7pm // University Bookstore, Bellevue // FREE Tuesday SOUND ECOLOGY: John Lombard, senior policy analyst for Steward and Associates, an environmental consulting firm, presents a proposal detailing the legal and political realities necessary for......

"I sent it to one organization, the Seattle True Independent Film Festival...and they declined by sending me an email form-letter," said Alex Mayer. We're sitting with Mayer in a coffeeshop down at Union Station--ironically in the same business park as Vulcan's glittering corporate office--talking about the delayed (by a year) Seattle debut of Mayer's new film, Paul Alien. The name of the movie gives you a good idea of the subject: "Seattle billionaire is......

Picture all the money in the state rounded up and stuffed into an enormous paper mache taxpayer suspended from the Space Needle. Blindfold Governor Gregoire and Mayor Nickels and hand them each a baseball bat. The mayor proposed a budget yesterday and hopefully the wonks are currently poking at it with those little CSI evidence sticks and ogling it through the magnifying glass helmets popularized by Rick Moranis in Honey I Shrunk the Kids. We'll......

By most accounts Starbucks is a great place to work. The money's ok and there's the possibility of medical benefits, which is sadly unheard of at any other service industry employer not named Dick's Drive In, so there is a strong temptation to ignore it when news of Starbucks employees unionizing comes around. "They don't know how good they have it - Try Wal-Mart." "They're hipsters playing Wobblie." "It's only two stores out of......

In today's blog mash-up, we have the Slog's Erica Barnett lighting a fiery feminist match under Details and their story on the Hollywood's new fascination with the "fat" woman -- e.g., Monica Bellucci, Rose McGowan. Then we stir in Sightline's Daily Score post analysis of whether or not walking uses more fossil fuel than driving. Both of these posts are awesome in their own way, but together they begin an unexpected conversation. You know,......

A few weeks ago, we posed this question, prompted by a debate on Wikipedia: Is Bellevue a suburb? At first, we thought the answer was obvious: yes, Bellevue is a suburb. But we were intrigued by the debate, both on Wikipedia and in our comments. As denver put it: The problem with the word "suburb" is that it lumps all kinds of communities together in a kind of pejorative limbo. Not a quaint "town" but......

Seattlest's kneejerk answer: Um, yeah. Is this a trick question? But it turns out suburb vs. not a suburb is a hot topic on Wikipedia at the moment. Arguments against Bellevue's suburban status: 1) It may have started as a suburb, but now it's really an edge city. 2) It's too big. It's got 117,000 people! It's the fifth largest city in Washington state! 3) Bellevue's economy isn't dependent on Seattle's anymore. 4) The......

-Let's not have a repeat of last year's fiasco. Make sure to read this guide to photographing fireworks. -If you're there, fine, but if you're the type who would forsake the out-of-doors this weekend for the live feed of Gnomedex, well, you can't be helped. -Howard Kuntsler responds to WorldChanging's questions about oil, the environment, Wal-Mart and his blog "Clusterfuck Nation." -Talking Points Memo is running a contest to see who can get Maria Cantwell's......

Here's the set-up: Alan Durning of the Sightline Institute, the Real Change Bus Chick, and the Petersons over on the Eastside have riled up the Seattle Weekly's Knute Berger. According to Berger (and if you're used to any semblance of logical consistency, grab a handrail and hold on), the problem with not having a car, or using one less, is that you become a moocher. Yes, mooching, because while the Durnings don't have their own......