The farm bill: Great news, but hold your nose

"Legislative Victory for Land Conservation," reads the alert from the Land Trust Alliance. The e-mail reports sweet news for anyone chafing under the Los Angeles-ization of the Evergreen State: the re-establishment of tax incentives for donated easements to conserve sensitive lands and open spaces.

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John Anderson's Pennsylvania postmortem

Consecrate a Scandinavian-American in the spirit of Obama-mania and footlight a contradiction: the Audacity of Pessimism.

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Popping the question

It's the one question in my brief, unremarkable career as a pseudo-journalist that I've ached to ask, and the tempest over question screening at this afternoon's University of Washington convocation honoring His Holiness the Dalai Lama provides just the opening.

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Bring on Lama-Palooza

But please don't ask about independence for Tibet.

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This just in: Boomers ruined America

On Monday night I went to see Brett Morgen's Chicago 10, an animated/snatches-of-newsreel documentary on the 1968 Democratic National Convention riots and subsequent Chicago Seven conspiracy trial (the filmmaker rounded the seven up to ten to include attorneys Bill Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass as well as Black Panther leader Bobby Seale).

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Reporters, 50-ish, continue aging

It happened twice in 2007 and again this past February: A journalist asked my age for a news item. No matter that youth is irrelevant in a meritocracy. Age has emerged as one of those nervy, reflexive questions that only third graders and professional scribblers are comfortable asking.

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The Lazy B's blue funk descends

In the Jet County, they're expending a lot of energy bemoaning Boeing's failure to win a big Air Force contract. There's not much locals can do about that. But a university, that's another matter.

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Ask not who wrote the words, ask whose words are rote

A former speechwriter considers the national rhetoric and whether words mean what they say, or if it depends on who says them.

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It's Presidents Day in Washington: So whom can we claim as ours?

Presidents Day evokes a chafe-inducing question: The Northwest has produced a president or two, yes?

The reflexive answer — that we’re too authentic to churn out presidents and, by the way, California ex-pats hail from Nixon country — is too 20th century. It’s time we adopt a president as One of Ours, someone who actually lived and labored in the Northwest.

Thankfully, at least one chief executive meets the worked-here criterion, a depressive Army captain stationed for 15 months at Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River. He was a whiskered, under-appreciated alcoholic, a failed businessman, a Mexican War hero who condemned the imperialism of that conflict, an advocate of our nation’s first national park, and a vigorous supporter of civil rights for African Americans.

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Microsoft, Yahoo, and betrayal in China

The two companies have been walking a not-so-fine line as they tap into an enormous but ethically challenged mainland Internet market. Yahoo, especially, has been deferential. Maybe their merger should have conditions.

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From Jim Crow to John Lovick

Snohomish County's new elected sheriff is African-American, which is worth noting, hopefully, only for a moment.

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From gathering place to loan store

In Sunday's Everett Herald, columnist Julie Muhlstein pays tribute to the recently razed 25th Street Market, a quasi-Third Place and community landmark. Muhlstein's vivid portrait throws into relief the 25th Street Market's apparent, excretable replacement: a future Moneytree Store. Hmmm. Nothing quite says "community values" better than a new payday lender.

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2007 in review: A West Point for public service

A big new idea takes hold with NW lawmakers. An update on what happened since a proposal was first published in Crosscut.

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A storm by any other name wouldn't be as wet

What's in a name? For one, the formerly elegant "Katrina" has been purged from those names-for-your-baby books (and "Pete," alas, is reserved exclusively for three-legged dogs). That's what's in a name. All the more reason for The Seattle Times to revive its U.S Weather Service-sponsored name-that-storm competition.

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You can't take Bellingham out of the boy

Ted Van Dyk's memoir of a career in national politics is the view of a principled idealist working, paradoxically, in proximity to power.

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The political legacy of Turk the Magic Genie

He's the latest of a long line of characters who have run for office. Turk lost up in Snohomish County. But some of the Northwest's clown princes have actually gotten elected. And some of them have served the people very well. No joke.

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Profiles encourage: Wisdom for today's politics

Political junkies and bibliophiles commence drooling: High on my bookshelf sits a first edition of John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage. You heard me: a pricey (at $3.30) Harpers hardback with the original, fraying dust jacket. The profiled politicos, from John Quincy Adams to Robert Taft, are listed vertically along the spine. On the back, JFK is identified as a 38-year-old senator and decorated WWII veteran. Improbably it reads, "In 1952 he became the third Democrat ever elected to the Senate from Massachusetts." (!) Political times, how they change.

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Remembering John Brisker, the Sonic who vanished in Africa

The mysterious, tragic disappearance and death of Northwest basketball star Tony Harris in Brazil brings to mind the mysterious, tragic disappearance (and presumed death) of retired Seattle SuperSonics forward John Brisker in Uganda 30 years ago. Unlike Harris, the John Brisker disappearance had a spiritual, picaresque quality, the adventurer-narrative of a lost soul journeying to a lost land. And then the soul vanishes.

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Please note that I was drinking

Cocker Fennessy, a Seattle public-relations firm, hosted the premier "pre-poll" party, an Oscar-night analogue for the Northwest's political class. It was a blast. (Disclosure: Cocker Fennessy wined me, fed me, and wined me again.) The election-night fete featured an impressive mix of politicos — a majority of the Seattle City Council as well as King County Council members Dow Constantine, Pete von Reichbauer, Julia Patterson, and Larry Phillips. These weary, cornered souls mingled with quasi-government honchos (Joni Earl, who runs Sound Transit, and David Dicks, the new director of the Puget Sound Partnership) as well as snack-grazing gadabouts (e.g., O. Casey Corr of Crosscut and me).

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Escaping Scandinavia

Newly displayed at Shilshole Bay Marina in Seattle, the Leif Erikson statue reminds us of those brave though seemingly sullen souls who fled Norway so many years ago. Of course, it should be pointed out that they fled what today is the highest-rated, most-livable country in the world.

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Pressing the flesh and passing the envelope

It's the time of year when candidates everywhere are handing out self-addressed envelopes known as "remits" — as in remittance. As in a campaign contribution. Some politicians are genuinely embarrassed to do it, but must. Which says a lot about the state of politics.

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The decline of gathering places

Loss of the longtime location of the Everett, Wash., Elks Club brings to mind the loss of "third places" generally, where neither home nor work prevail and a sense of community is forged — or was.

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My brief career as a spy with John McCain in China

The senator and presidential candidate comes to Seattle for a fundraiser, prompting barstool memories of the time when an Everett, Wash., kid met up with McCain in 1979 in the Gobi Desert.

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The Pacifist Northwest: We're the nation's volunteer factory

Washington and Oregon colleges and universities lead the nation in supplying Peace Corps volunteers, with the University of Washington No. 1. With that and other factors in mind, it's time for the congressional delegations to work to get the planned U.S. Public Service Academy sited here.

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The legacy of Idaho's Frank Church has been shredded

The senator chaired the committee that birthed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a Watergate-inspired law which the U.S. attorney general now says does not apply to the White House.

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