Finally, progressive activists are taking a page from Tim Eyman's book and taking aim at an important issue: a statewide initiative to stop a federal plan to import much of the country's low-level nuclear waste to Hanford.

Of course, activists still don't quite have the hang of this--as of yet, there's no catchy name like the "Save Our Children from Slow, Horribly Painful Death Act of 2004." But the goal of sponsors like Heart of America Northwest, the Government Accountability Project, Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility, and others is to gather enough signatures to get the measure on the ballot in November 2004, where hopefully a coalition of west-of-mountain enviros and east-of-mountain DoE-haters can put into law a measure that state Democrats should have championed years ago.

In Nevada, which was faced with a similar issue when the feds decided to make Yucca Mountain its repository for high-level waste, state elected officials of both parties united to fight the feds. In the end, Congress trumped state law and Nevadans had the waste rammed down their throats anyway. But even if it meets the same fate, the Washington state initiative would at least put a long-overdue spotlight on an environmental catastrophe that Puget Sound environmentalists--let alone media--inexplicably ignore.

For petitions and more info, contact Heart of America at 206-382-1014, or check www.heartofamericanorthwest.org. --Geov Parrish

Speaking of protecting children from slow, grotesque death--this time of the mental kind--it looks like there will be several progressive challengers to Seattle's living testimonies to the Peter Principle--the fat, happy, and especially lazy school board members up for re-election this fall. And one will be a doozy.

Long-time ETS! supporter, former Green Party co-chair, and Citizens' Campaign for Commercial-Free Schools (CCCS) co-founder and Executive Director Brita Butler-Wall has announced she is running against school board president Nancy Waldman in Waldman's northeast Seattle district. (School board candidates compete in districts in the primary, with the top two finishers moving on to a city-wide election in November.) Butler-Wall is--in my completely biased opinion--one of the most effective grassroots activists in the city. A prototypical soccer mom who got politicized in the mid-'90s by the commercialism-in-schools issue, she has been the single person most responsible for the district's 180 degree reversal on that issue--an amazing accomplishment given that this district is consistently more hostile to public input than any other elected body I've ever encountered. In the process, she's also had a crash course in that hostility, and the incompetence it protects.

Smart, trained (with a doctorate in education), articulate, energetic, and funny, Brita couldn't be a clearer contrast with the frequently inert Waldman. Waldman is a 100% auto-vote for the top-heavy, self-congratulatory educational bureaucracy that is currently gutting programs, laying off teachers, and anesthetizing kids to make up for its own accountability-free incompetence.

Along with rookie Mary Bass--the only board member who has consistently demanded answers for the current fiscal fiasco--Butler-Wall and other progressive candidates provide the first realistic chance in memory for a school board that would actually prioritize kids. If elections ever matter, they do so at the most local of levels where bureaucracies intersect with our daily lives. This is one campaign worth going all-out for. --G.P.

Oh, and while we're on local accountability: what is it that makes official Seattle so completely unwilling to confront its police? The LEIU police riot this month made it utterly clear, once again, that SPD is out of control. And the reason it's out of control is that, unlike most other cities, the officials with legal authority to control it--the mayor and the city council--refuse to do so. The way Seattle's city council works, citizen complaints are routinely funneled to the one council member who chairs the committee with oversight for that function. Public Safety is chaired by Jim Compton, who, like Margaret Pageler and Tina Podlodowski before him, could not care less. Compton was the guy who threw out the citizens who took time off work to come to City Hall's 11th floor to testify before his committee; meanwhile, Mayor Nickels quietly locked down the 12th floor, too. And if this is how a crowd of primarily educated, middle class white folks are treated, think of how Seattle's non-white communities are received--and how they're treated by predatory cops. The folks who can stop it won't. Gutless wonders. --G.P.

Speaking of police accountability, who in the city approved SPD's purchase of AR-15 type machine guns--the sort of wholesale killing weapons that belong in the military, not an urban police force. And who in SPD approved one being toted around by an officer at the LEIU demonstration? Specifically, what scenario was envisioned, and by whom, that would make such a weapon's use necessary at a legal, permitted demonstration?

In the past, such weapons have been spotted at anti-war, global justice, and police-accountability demonstrations in Seattle. The city has denied it has them, let alone deploys them. But this time, it was caught on film, with additional eyewitnesses--including me--to back it up. --G.P.

Normally, we'd run a long treatise blasting the utterly predictable, Republican-driven June 2 decision by the Federal Communications Commission to lift many of the last remaining restrictions on the ability of large broadcast networks and companies to buy up each other, more stations, or prominent newspapers in the same markets. But given the financial challenges of today's marketplace (see "From the Kitchen" in this issue), our lawyers and broker have advised us not to comment, as it might drive down the price of the lucrative bids we're now considering from what would become Time-Warner-Clear Channel-Viacom-Fox-Disney-Eat!-AOL. We foresee that readers will hardly notice any editorial changes at all. As FCC Chair Michael Powell himself noted, media consolidation doesn't lead to political censorship--it helps media outlets do their jobs more efficiently. Readers of the new, slightly repositioned Adore the State! will surely agree. --G.P.

Further signs of the US military's loss of control in Iraq emerged this week, as US viceroy Paul Bremer announced that he had a team of people drafting "guidelines" for the Iraqi media to follow. Journalists in Iraq immediately condemned this move as censorship. Bremer then responded by banning all forms of "hate-speech" against the US and the occupation government. Iraqi journalists remember with irony similar decrees from Saddam Hussein. But there's another occupation government that the US Interim Authority is resembling these days: Israel. As US troops move from house-to-house in towns and villages West of Baghdad, handcuffing men and boys and throwing women to the floor, confiscating people's hoards of cash, taking their rifles (their only means of ensuring personal safety in a lawless society), and shooting innocent civilians who try to run away from them (or, in the case of one elderly man and his grown sons, farmers attempting to put out fires in their fields caused by US military flares), the Iraqi people will see themselves as the Palestinians and the US as the evil aggressors trying to steal their resources. No amount of food and medicine supplied after the fact will change that view. The violation of their homes and the loss of their freedoms will be apparent, humiliating, and not soon forgotten.--Maria Tomchick

Speaking of loss of freedom, the UN has told BBC News that Iraqi women are being forced to wear the veil. It's happening not just in remote villages or southern Shiite strongholds, but in Baghdad and other urban areas, where clerics are threatening both Christian and Muslim women to cover up or risk a beating or worse. The UN says that Iraqi women are no longer able to freely drive alone or walk at night, and rapes have increased dramatically. In addition, a female UN aid worker was recently threatened with death unless she covered her hair. So much for that "freedom" we've brought Iraq; at least half of the society is experiencing a type of oppression they've never seen in their lifetimes--M.T. Source: "Iraqi women 'forced to veil,'" BBC News, 6/13/03.

While the Bush administration rails against the government of Iran, Bush & Co. continue to supply cash and weapons to the country that topped the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions' list of the world most dangerous places to organize. Colombia receives more foreign aid from the US than almost any other nation in the world, except for Israel. Last year, once again, more trade unionists were killed in Colombia than all the other nations in the world combined. The ICFTU recorded 184 murdered trade unionists in Colombia versus 206 killings in all of Latin America. Such killings remain rare in the rest of the world. Right-wing paramilitary death squads supported by rich landowners, businessmen, and the military were largely responsible for the assassinations. As usual, the Bush administration had nothing to say on the subject.--M.T.

While the Bushies and our compliant US press lambastes Iran for clamping down on protesters in Tehran, somehow they've forgotten about the Myanmar military's recent massacre of opposition supporters and the imprisonment of Burma's democratically elected leader, Nobel Peace Prize-winner Aung San Suu Kyi. Suu Kyi's party won national elections 13 years ago, but has never been able to take power because of the Myanmar military's iron rule. Suu Kyi has been living under house arrest and now outright imprisonment since 1990. Sure, Saddam was a bad guy. And Iran's clerics hold too much power. But in Burma, Suu Kyi has been trying nonviolently to get rid of a dictatorial military junta for over a decade, with no support other than empty platitudes from the US government. If Iraq's WMD are not that important, if ties to Al Qaeda are not the real reason we got rid of Saddam, if the ultimate motivation was to free the Iraqi people from a tyrant, then why doesn't the Bush administration at least slap sanctions on Burma/Myanmar? Well, for one thing, Burma doesn't have huge oil fields...--M.T.