Oh those wacky Republicans in Snohomish County. Geri Modrell, the chairwoman of the Snohomish Republican Party, has issued an apology after some GOP volunteers at the Evergreen State Fair sold racist $3 bills (available at conservative websites everywhere!) "depicting Sen. Barack Obama in traditional Arab headgear with a camel." Good one, guys. He's a Secret Muslim A-Rab devil, who goes by "Da Man," and he's got Ted Kennedy as his "Chief Socialism Advisor" and......

Robert L. Jamieson has a big, big problem with the way things are down in Belltown and a pretty strong idea of who's to blame: If the fates had cast Greg Nickels as mayor of New York City when Times Square was the pits, overrun with crime and grime, the renaissance of the one-time eyesore would have stayed a dream. "One-time eyesore," huh? Apparently Robert Jamieson hasn't been to New York recently. Jamieson's been on......

One more event for tonight: Christian Lander, the biting satirist of Stuff White People Like, makes a free appearance tonight at the Hideout (1005 Boren Ave) to shill the book based on his blog. There's a private dinner beforehand--begging the question "Exactly what stuff do white people like to eat?"--but tickets to that portion of the evening are long sold out. Show up any time after 8 p.m. to buy a book, get it signed,......

Chad Goller-Sojourner's Sitting in Circles With Rich White Girls: Memoirs of a Bulimic Black Boy opens tonight at the BrownBox Theatre @ the Rainier Valley Cultural Center, and runs through Sunday, July 20. Tix available online. In terms of identity, Chad Goller-Sojourner either hit the jackpot or got the short end of the stick, depending on one's perspective: a gay black man raised by a white family with a "girl's" eating disorder. "I thought it......

Many thoughts crossed our mind last night as we left the showing of Edward Curtis's In the Land of the Head Hunters at the Moore, not the least of which was our continued amazement that film ever took off. No more or less so than contemporaneous films like Birth of a Nation, Curtis's work bears witness to the fact that early film sucked. The narrative is disjointed, the story thin and hard to follow. It......

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama's controversial pastor and friend, gave a widely criticized speech yesterday on Black Liberation Theology, patriotism, and his relationship with Barack Obama. Obama gave a press conference of his own today, saying he's "outraged" at Rev. Wright's "appalling" comments. He emphasized that Rev. Wright was never his "spiritual advisor," though the pastor married the Senator and his wife and prayed with them the day Obama announced his presidential candidacy. Some......

A few weeks ago, singer/raconteur Jenny Owen Youngs was in town, playing at the High Dive the same time as the Fremont Bridge was being closed evenings, which led to our arriving mid-set in a state of high dudgeon. We decided to skip a half-assed review, and afterwards fired off some impertinent questions via email. We just heard back, and as you'll see, Jenny schools us a bit. Now we adore her even more. If......

Things we love: The football, themes, and the films of Joan Crawford Things we want to love, but never learned how to do: Cooking and kissing a girl with our eyes closed. This has lead to our amazing idea. Every week we are going to pick a food from the city of the Seahawks opponent. Sunday morning we will buy the ingredients at a farmers market or major supermarket chain, and prepare the dish for......

Al D'Amato isn't a U.S. senator anymore, but continues to act like one. D'Amato's fathered a child at the age of 70, which is four years shy of Strom Thurmond's record, but nothing to sniff at. The mother, Katuria Smith D'Amato, 41, is a local girl. The New York Times recapped her background when she married D'Amato in 2004.The bride graduated cum laude from the University of Washington and received a law degree from......

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......

Monday CALL 911! CALL 911!: Political and economic commentator and White House strategist during the Nixon administration, Kevin Phillips talks about his book, American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century. Phillips traces the set of related causes that caused the downfall of historical world powers. That same combination of ills he says -- global over-reach, militant religion, resource problems, and ballooning debt -- is......

Why does the legislature want to require students to be able to read and write before they graduate high school? Because they are racist! So says the Seattle Education Association, the union of Seattle teachers, which apparently has so little access to state legislators that it's reduced to screaming racism, like a non-profit version of that crazy guy who hangs out by Pacific Place. They (the SEA) claim racism because the legislature is going to......

Spring appears to have, er, sprung, at least temporarily, in most of the Ist-A-Verse, so naturally, we're all feeling pretty good. (Yes, we know that spring doesn't officially start till later this month. Just let us enjoy our weather!) And that makes us that much more eager to share all of the nifty things we're up to... Over at Sampaist, spring has more than sprung: it's sweltering! But, as everyone knows, museums are an......

A local documentarian got nominated for an Oscar whenever they announced these things. We won't divulge his name, because who knows if he wants to be associated with something as stupid as the Oscars. If we ever get nominated blog of the year by the National Association of Illiterates, please, keep it on the dl. Our hate affair with the Oscars began in 1987, when the dreadful "Take My Breath UH-way" won best song over......

Texas is thawing, the Northeast is freezing, and a sort of natural order seems almost restored to the Ist-A-Verse. Almost. Londonist HQ—that is to say, the city of London—was battered by heavy winds, making it a bad time to be a twelve-meter (nearly forty-foot) tall snowman. Still, not everyone decided to keep warmly covered. Meanwhile, back indoors, the Big Brother racism is now causing all kinds of headaches for international diplomats, and Londonist got into......

It's been business as usual since the day after the storm in some Seattle neighborhoods. We eat, we drink, we Christmas shop, we gather all the shingles from the street and life goes on. Meanwhile, the Eastside continues to live red in tooth and claw. It's still mostly dark over there and crowds await Mel Gibson's next gasoline delivery at each service station. Hopefully it'll drive home how much energy it takes to power a......

Wednesday, November 15 >>>UW iSchool at Kane Hall, 7:00-9:00pm. "Voices in an Empty Room: Five Apologies for the Narrative": Children's author Richard Peck discusses his writing and teaching careers, and his experiences with the kids today. He'll read from On The Wings Of Heroes, his new novel about a World War II childhood. Free with RSVP. Kane Hall, Rm. 220. >>>Third Place Books, 7:00pm. We saw this book talk about adoptive parents and thought......

--That lovey dovey crap we said about Microsoft and China earlier today? Forget it. --Best unloved Reality TV-based Halloween costume. Ever. --Couple local skiers seem to be mixed up in a porn thing with a guy called Warren Miller. --John Moe unveils the girls team secretly plotting the violent overthrow of the boys team. Go on, girls! --SeattleDuck says no to procrastination, yes to Getting Things Done. --Renton's Displaced Hipster displaces himself even further,......

Let's look back at a week in which no site in the -ist network adopted anyone from Africa... -Austinist reveled in the dumb antics of some U.T. law students and posted some great audio from former New Orleans natives who've decided to stay in Austin. But the best news for Austinist? They were voted Best Local Entertainment Web Site by the local Austin alt-weekly. Congrats, Austinist. -DCist gloried in being told their musical tastes made......

Guest Poster Race Card Pete is back. He's a program director at KUBE, and in his spare time he tutors children at Sacajawea Elementary School. He lives in Bitter Lake, but is about to move into a fixer-upper in the Central District. Previously he wrote on a possible Sonics area deal. It seems odd that with all the proposed solutions to the city's transportation woes, the only major project that is currently underway, Sound......

We're glad we stuck around for the audience Q&A after the panel discussion on gentrification Thursday night, hosted by the University of Washington's Evans School of Public Affairs. That way we got to hear from the intense woman who discoursed on a variety of topics, including the abomination of Wal-Mart, things being done in Boston, and the lack of education about some guy whose name we can't remember; and from the gentleman who wondered aloud......

The New York Times, with annoying & typical provincialism, claims that black chefs are "struggling" [note: free registration required]. Not so in Seattle, where a culinary star like Daisley Gordon shines at Campagne. More to the point, a baker's dozen black chefs gathered last night to present "Food As Art," a celebration of African-American culinary expertise, at a fundraiser for the ">Central District Forum for Arts & Ideas. Subject of a splendid profile in the......

Bernard-Henri Levy occupies a position in France roughly comparable to...well, we don't have anyone like him. Rock star Bono comes close. Jon Stewart, maybe, except that BHL writes his own material. Sporting an unruly haircut, clad in the requisite uniform (black shirt, black blazer), he's a familiar figure on French TV, the embodiment of the Public Intellectual. Atlantic Monthly sent him on a year-long assignment to retrace the intellectual journey taken by de Tocqueville; the......

In the days leading up to the election, we will amalgamate what the four newspapers had to say about the races into one combined blurb for each candidate or initiative because we do not purport to follow city politics closely enough to advise anyone, even ourselves, how to vote. That's why God invented local politics writers. Mayor of Seattle (non-partisan) Greg Nickels: The incumbent was “a doer in his first term” who “focused on basics”......