Last week, the Seattle City Council's Budget Committee passed its version of the city's 2006 annual budget. The budget contains some interesting changes from the original document Mayor Greg Nickels sent to the council in September.

Most significantly, the council added $2.5 million in additional funding for the city's libraries, enabling them next year to extend hours and open on Sundays. In recent years Nickels has consistently cut the library system's budget, promising to restore the cuts when times got better, but Nickel's budget proposal included nothing for the libraries.

A spirited lobbying campaign led by the library's nonprofit foundation and by council members Peter Steinbrueck and Jean Godden (!) restored the library's funding to 1999 levels--no thanks to Nickels.

Other budgetary tweakings of interest included adding $628,000 to study a transit replacement for the West Seattle-Ballard Green Line corridor that would have been served by the now-defunct monorail, and restoring $350,000 in cuts to shelter beds for the homeless. However, there's no allowance for inflation, meaning that the 2006 budget will represent a net loss of available beds for the city's down and out. --Geov Parrish

At the University of Washington, student activists of color are once again challenging the UW administration to get serious about diversity on campus. A newly-formed coalition of student groups from the UW's Ethnic Cultural Center have drawn up a four-point plan, intended for the administration to act upon, to increase the representation of underrepresented groups on campus--among both students and the UW faculty. A crucial part of that plan is a proposal to require all UW students to take a five-credit American ethnic studies class in order to graduate.

While the UW has talked a lot of pro-diversity talk since the 1998 passage of I-200, meaningful institutional change has been lacking, while the UW has prioritized the building of monuments to the Gates and Allen families on campus over committing serious resources towards diversity efforts. In 1968, it was up to the students to force change: The UW Black Student Union's historic Administration Building sit-in on May 20, 1968 resulted in the creation of the UW's Office of Minority Affairs and its various Ethnic Studies programs. Today's ECC groups remember that crucial history of how student initiative got the University to put its money where its mouth is on diversity, and the leaders of the new ECC-based coalition--undergrads Jamil Suleman, Chloe Ameh and Alonso Alvarado--all have considerable experience as campus activists through groups such as the BSU and the Minority Think Tank.

Students are leading once again at the UW. Will administrators be wise enough to follow them this time? Stay tuned. --Jeff Stevens

Budget battles were also brewing last week on Capitol Hill, where House Republicans used a week-long delay in voting to twist just enough arms to pass a draconian, $49.9 billion package of budget cuts by a 217-215 vote. In addition to brutal cuts to Medicaid, food stamps, student loan programs, and other items for the poor, the House budget also contains several different tax cuts for the wealthy--literally taking from the poor and giving to the rich.

The House budget must now be reconciled with a Senate budget bill that contains "only" $35 billion in cuts. The conferencing process means there's still time to lobby congresspeople: No stealing from the poor and giving to the rich! --G.P.

As Congress breaks for two weeks, negotiations between the House and Senate over an extension to the PATRIOT Act have reached an impasse. The PATRIOT Act expires on Dec. 31, and has to be passed all over again if not extended before that date. The House wants to extend it by 10 years, the Senate by 4, and there are other differences as well.

The impasse means there's still time--at least a couple of weeks--to lobby congresspeople to not extend the PATRIOT ACT at all! Legislators need to hear from us on this one; the more they hear, the more likely it is that, even if they extend it, it won't be with some of the more odious provisions in the 2001 bill. --G.P.

Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito has had a really disingenuous reply to the revelation of his uber-conservative leanings revealed in a 1985 job application to the Reagan White House. (Among many other things, he stated that the Constitution does not support a woman's right to reproductive freedom.)

His defense is that his personal political beliefs are trumped by his deep reverence for well-established precedent, which he would never vote to overturn. But this simply isn't true. He has repeatedly filed opinions and dissents against established precedent while on the federal bench. And this is exactly the defense used 15 years ago by Clarence Thomas when senators challenged his reactionary legal views. Thomas, of course, started voting to overturn precedent his first week on the bench, and he's been at it ever since.

The problem is that there is now a critical mass of these yahoos in the Supreme Court, and another one would tip the balance and give a 5-4 majority to the rollback of reproductive freedoms, civil rights, civil liberties, and all other manner of issues that come before the court. Alito sides with corporations, the government, and the powerful, and against the powerless--always. I've been really disappointed that there hasn't been more of a groundswell against his nomination. As I wrote last issue, it's the most important and far-reaching issue now facing progressives. We have less than two months to stop him. --G.P.

A couple of Iraq developments that didn't get much play last week. South Korean officials, sticking it to the Americans, waited until George Bush was in their country for AOEC to announce that they are withdrawing all but 1,000 of their 3,200 soldiers from Iraq. Poland is ending its commitment at year's end, and the "Coalition of the Willing" is getting smaller and smaller. --G.P.

Meanwhile, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour called last week for an independent international investigation into allegations of torture by Iraqi government officials. The call came after 173 Iraqis, many emaciated and showing signs of torture, were discovered in the Interior Ministry.

Hey, well, they learned from the best. --G.P.