Got an interesting phone call from one of the architects working on the taxpayer-funded skybridge that will connect Paul Allen's Union Square Tower and Paul Allen's football stadium/convention center. This person was all stoked about Allen and the Public [sic] Stadium Authority specifying design features to discourage the downtrodden from using this allegedly public facility. Alas, it's a standard design feature these days; but the chat did confirm a larger point. Stadium contractors are taking taxpayers for a ride: ordering expensive, duplicate consultants and the like. Unlike any other public project, Allen got Olympia to exempt his playpen from any standard contract and bidding requirements; the PSA, stacked with Allen buddies, is the sole public oversight of how the public's money is spent. As we've detailed in the past, the open trough represented by this project is an ongoing crime.--Geov Parrish

Is the Clinton Administration the worst in generations for systematic gutting of constitutional rights in favor of the modern police state? In early March, reports the newsletter CounterPunch, Clinton signed a presidential directive placing the National Security Council in charge of counter-terrorism, giving it broad new surveillance powers. A few days later, the CIA's budget was quietly upped by $100 million; intelligence agencies "find themselves ever closer to...once again getting the green light for [legal] domestic operations."--G.P.

ETS! got no less than four offers to write pieces on the Jonesboro schoolyard shootings last month. The story hit a nerve--people wanted to talk about the ready availability of gun, violent media, patriarchy, child abuse, personal responsibility, you name it. It became a sort of litmus test for what folks ranked as the top reasons for society's ills-- are they caused by violence? Media? Sexism? Racism? Adultism? Capitalism? Reductionism? Chickenism? Eggism?

The story also proved fertile ground for a smug, liberal bias that's pissing me off more and more as years go by: the mythology of the violent, stupid, racist Southern redneck. Here it played out as the cultural background that encourages such tragedies. Not that such people don't exist; the point is, they exist everywhere. Every region in this country that is culturally dominated by what are (in this case) called rednecks, and ruled by rednecks with money.

Scapegoating Southern whites for the sins of the rest of the country's zeitgeist is an old game. The only real difference in the approach in Southern states is the rootedness of the region's traditions--and, hence, the openness and honesty with which they're embraced. But if you want white racism, get out a map of Seattle and look at how it's segregated. And where the city's dollars go. You want gun culture? Go to the next heavily attended gun show at the Kingdome. You want a sheep-fucking unsophisticate (one New York-based radio host's assessment of the affair)? Go to any event at the Tacoma Dome and listen. Or, for nicely dressed ones, Seattle Opera. And whites who single out the South over slavery would enhance their credibility if they started giving land back to the few surviving members of their nearest displaced Native American tribe--a holocaust that in these parts was more recent than slavery, lacks Presidential "dialogues," and, judging from the support for Slade Gorton's efforts at treaty-breaking, remains pretty popular.

When hip liberal urbanites sneer at America, mostly what they do is produce an America that, unsurprisingly, hates hip liberal urbanites. Seattle is as racist a major city as this country has, specifically because whitelibs don't feel they need to deal with the issue. So they don't. My parents happen to live 70 miles from Jonesboro, Arkansas; I have no particular love for that part of the country or its people, many of whom proudly uphold things I despise. But so do a lot of people in King County, and frankly, there ain't much difference.--G.P.