An ad hoc group of progressive community activists, including Curt Firestone, John Fox, Matt Fox, and Cindy Domingo, is looking for a candidate to challenge Mayor Greg Nickels in this fall's election. After first being turned down by city councilman Nick Licata, about a dozen of the activists met on Jan. 17 with former gubernatorial candidate Phil Tallmadge.

The activists then prepared a letter, to be signed by scores of community leaders and groups, urging Tallmadge to run. But that letter is now on hold, and Tallmadge says he's almost certainly not running. "It's not a position I'm oriented toward," Tallmadge said last Monday. "I've been a state government guy. This isn't to say that I'm thrilled with Greg, because I'm not. I think the viaduct proposal is utter nonsense. The disproportionate interest in Paul Allen and South Lake Union bothers me, to say the least. But it's not something that jumps out at me as something I want to do."

And, so, the hunt for a viable challenger goes on. --Geov Parrish

A Seattle Central Community College campus anti-war group is in hot water after students chased military recruiters off the SCCC campus during an Inauguration Day anti-Bush rally. Nobody was hurt in the incident, in which students ripped up recruiting literature and verbally confronted the recruiters, but right-wing bloggers and radio talk shows across the country have gotten hold of the story and are besieging SCCC administrators with demands to, uh, discipline the students.

The upshot, says Pete Knudson, the students' faculty advisor, was a letter from the administration demanding that the students apologize within a week or have their organization disbanded. In his response to the administration, Knudson noted that such an action was collective punishment for individual actions, that recruiters knew there would be large protests that day, and that asking them to apologize was like "a show trial for a dictatorship." --G.P.