From the buzz circulating the budding career of Josh Blue, we thought his Saturday evening performance at the Kirkland Performance Center would be full of self-deprecating and occasionally awkward humor. It was not. Let’s start with the facts. Blue has Cerebral Palsy. He is a stand-up comedian. He is funny - no, he is hilarious. He is a Nike-sponsored striker for the U.S. Paralympic soccer team. Finally, he feels compelled to use anything with......

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......

Conventional wisdom says these days ain't happy ones for pulp-and-print publications. Circulation's down. Ad revenues are down. Everyone wants to read online. So nearly every newspaper, magazine and television news program has a host of blogs these days, to compete with the millions of self-described experts, autodidacts, conspiracy theorists and Chuck Norris-aficionados who propagate the blogosphere with their own brand of citizen journalism (read: poor spelling and poorer grammar). Indeed, it's hard to get noticed......

We had to agree with On the Boards' executive staff (Lane Czaplinksi and Sarah Wilke) statement in the liner notes to The Adventures of Ali and Ali and the Axes of Evil that they had been “excited about presenting Vancouver’s neworldtheatre since the first moment [they] saw the image of a smiling President Bush holding a little wild eyed man baby.” Admittedly, this was a large part of the reason why we wanted to......

THEATER: The Brown Derby Series, which debilitated audiences last year with their staged production of Trapped in the Closet, is back, this time they're doing Total Recall. With Seattlest favorite Dusty Warren! Doors at 7pm, show at 8pm // Re-bar [1114 Howell] // $12, 21 and over only, runs through Thursday. No reservations, you may want to line up early. SPORTS: #1 O'Dea hosts #4 Chief Sealth. You've gotta see a game at O'Dea's gym......

"The Decider" will be yakkin at you tonight, beginning at 6pm PST, in a nationally-televised address expected to last for about 30 minutes. The topic: The Iraq War, which President Bush wants to try to win--understandably so, as his other option is to pull out and go down in history as the guy with sole responsibility for the senseless deaths of 2,997 American soldiers (as of Saturday). That's exactly the same number of people as......

President Bush has announced that Donald Rumsfeld will be replaced with former Mt. Vernon resident Robert Gates, who is currently the president of Texas A&M University. The only thing we really know about Texas A&M is that they hate when other people use the number 12. So take heed rest of the world, stay away from a certain number lest you want to be bombed back to the Stone Age.......

Everyone's going to get all lovey-dovey today and say, "Oh, I don't care who you vote for, just get to the polls and make your voice heard for the sake of democracy, blah, blah." Even President Bush, the most partisan president in a century, said as much this morning. Fuck that. Most voting choices on this year's ballot are ok (Honestly, is McGavick really that much more of a corporate tool than Cantwell?). But if......

From King County Journal, via the Slog, the Issaquah school bus driver fired for flipping off President Bush is now employed as a driver for the Renton school district. Interestingly, as much as many people would love her act to be evidence of increasing dissatisfaction with the Bush administration (truly, once you lose school bus drivers, you've lost the nation) her explanation of the incident indicates that her middle-fingering wasn't political--the way we read this,......

Dave Reichert not only admits that he tattled on a school-bus driver who flipped off President Bush, he brags about it. And David Postman of the Seattle Times has it on tape. An excerpt from Reichert's speech at the King County Republican picnic in August: And as the motorcade went by, the President and I drove by on I-5, the President was having a great time. He was waving at everybody, he waved at the......

We linked to a story earlier this week about how an Issaquah school bus driver got fired after Dave Reichert witnessed him give President Bush the finger. Yesterday David Postman reported that the driver wasn't fired simply for flipping off the President: "This was part of a pattern of behavior with this particular bus driver, not an isolated incident," [Superintendent Janet] Barry said. This is a bigger story than we initially realized - This driver......

For weeks Mike McGavick has seen the same poll standing stiff. The latest Survey USA Election Poll has Maria Cantwell at 54% and Mike!!!!!! at 42%. The poll was taken the weekend after the kick-ass debate on KING-5, and during the release of McGavick’s Seattle Times endorsement. He has been stuck between 37% and 42% since August, and for the next week will just have to suck up that poll and push hard towards the......

An MSNBC poll released today showed Maria Cantwell up 52%-37% on Mike McGavick. She's increased her lead from 10% about three weeks ago. The poll was taken from October 17-19, so mostly after the two debates (the final one was on the 17th). McGavick gained no ground from the debates, in fact he lost ground. The poor guy's fighting an uphill battle: 55% of those polled say they strongly disapprove of President Bush. But McGavick......

The Seattle Times reports that Governor Gregoire doesn't want to increase the gas tax to pay for whatever replaces the Viaduct. Instead, she says, "it's really about those who use it pay." Sounds like she's chanelling President Bush. But the Times says she's talking about tolls. Not a bad idea. Tolls don't necessarily mean long lines at tollbooths anymore. If you drive Highway 407 in Ontario, a camera snaps your license plate number and you......

Breaking the law, breaking the law We -ist folks love us some crime, and no misdemeanor is too petty for a post on any of our sites. This week, join us for a rogues' gallery of miscreants major, minor, and alleged. Gothamist gets us started with "Law & Order", muppet style. Oh, you know what isn't a crime? Taking pictures on the MTA. So, why are cops stopping photographers? In other Gotham crime, a......

Even as the stores sport back to school sales (which depress us, even now), summer lingers on your friends the -ists. This week's collection of links provides some of the best, worst, and oddest bits of summer fun. So, bring your laptop up onto the roof, make yourself an umbrella drink or ten, and enjoy this week's choice posts from across the Gothamist network. Torontoist (where it's 75 degrees F as of this writing)......

Earlier this month, the National Parks Conservation Association celebrated the 100th anniversary of the founding of our country's National Park system. Perhaps trying to steal a little limelight from Al Gore, President Bush managed to avoid his father's inactivity in this arena by using the 1906 Antiquities Act to establish a national monument in New York (an African Burial Ground) and creating the world's largest protected marine area off Hawaii's coast. (His pop joins the......

We guarantee that sometime during this week's crucial series against Oakland, Dave Niehaus will employ the phrase "house of horrors" to describe McAfee Coliseum. With good reason. It's where Mariners seasons have traditionally gone to die. Even during the glory season of 1995, the Mariners were not immune to the Coliseum's mojo. In a mid-August game, Mike Blowers made two errors in the ninth inning, leading to two unearned runs and a 3-2 loss......

Governor Gregoire, apparently unaware that her job could be taken from her in two and a half years, is leaving it up the state's National Guardsmen whether they want to patrol the US-Mexico border. President Bush is sending 6,000 National Guard members to the Southern border to end the problem of people entering the country illegally. Showing the kind of bold decision-making that caused her to get outpolled by John "My position on the war......

Um...ok, let's see here. We've got President Bush here now, he's a right-hander out of Texas. Uh..His approval rating is at 33%. That's, uh, that's... a little lower than you'd like. Want to try to have that approval rating around 50% if you can. Let's see...Gas costs $2.95/gallon. That's a little higher than you'd like there. $477 billion deficit, that's higher than you'd like, but he's had some bad breaks. A couple of interest......

The Harvard Exit hosted one of those first come/first serve free screenings of the new Dan Clowes/Terry Zwigoff film Art School Confidential Monday night. The theater had a special row of seats reserved for the beleaguered hard-working employees of the local funny book factory that published both the screenplay and the original comic book series from which the film derives its material... or so the poor schlubs were led to believe. PSYCHE! Turns out all......

A couple of national heavies just blew through town to promote either side of our coming senate race and the most interesting things to come out of both visits was the dissent. Maria Cantwell got called out for the Iraq war votes that she's sticking to while she was sharing the stage with Barak Obama. John McCain's finest Seattle moment happened on the radio after his McGavick event. A caller asked about the shady background......

This week, federal judge John Jones knocked down the mandate from a Pennsylvania school board that their science teachers present Intelligent Design as a valid alternative to evolution in their classrooms. While he was at it, he smacked the Dover School board for being a bunch of disingenuous liars. Scientists, teachers, and intelligent people from all walks of life, religious or otherwise, rejoiced. The Discovery Institute responded with...diatribe. Dr. John West, Associate Director of the......

Federal judge Richard Posner defends President Bush's extra-legal (meaning, surprisingly, not legal at all) spying program thusly: The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act makes it difficult to conduct surveillance of U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents unless they are suspected of being involved in terrorist or other hostile activities. That is too restrictive. Innocent people, such as unwitting neighbors of terrorists, may, without knowing it, have valuable counterterrorist information. So, since anyone in the country may......