George Bush is coming to town on August 27 at a fundraising event in downtown Bellevue for Rep. Dave Reichert (R-Hairspray). (Funny how Reichert tries to claim he's an independent, bipartisan kinda guy, but almost always votes Bush's way--especially on Iraq--and keeps going to the fundraising well with the most unpopular, not to say incompetent and odious, president in modern American history.) Anyway, there'll surely be a big Western Washington welcome of some sort. No details available at press time, but keep your eyes peeled for demonstration announcements. --Geov Parrish

After months of ongoing lobbying and protests by Youth Against War and Racism (YAWR) and others, the Seattle School Board has voted to restrict military recruiters' access to Seattle schools. Under the new policy, recruiters and others wanting kids to cast their future with them (i.e., colleges and employers) can only visit campuses twice per year. It wasn't everything YAWR wanted, but still represents an impressive victory for youth organizing. --G.P.

Props to Rep. Jay Inslee for introducing a bill last week to impeach Alberto Gonzales. As Congress adjourned for August, the bill already had 20 co-sponsors. Now, while the reps are back schmoozing in their home districts for the month, would be a good time to remind Rep. Jim McDermott to sign onto Inslee's bill--and to remind Inslee to join McDermott in backing Rep. Dennis Kucinich's bill, H.R. 333, to impeach Dick Cheney. Inslee also still needs to join McDermott and 69 other colleagues who signed a letter to Bush last month pledging never to vote for money for the Iraq war again. And they all need to sign on to impeach George Bush for his many crimes against his office, the law, the constitution, and humanity. --G.P.

When the Interstate 35-W bridge on the northeast side of downtown Minneapolis collapsed last Wednesday, within hours a Homeland Security Department spokescreature was on the news intoning that "this was not an act of terrorism." Bullshit. The I-35 bridge collapse was an act of terror. Specifically, it was a direct outgrowth of the last six years' Bush administration campaign of terror against the American people, wherein great heaps of misinformation and fearmongering, credulously parroted by corporate media, succeeded in terrorizing and paralyzing us to the extent that they were able to divert hundreds of billions of dollars away from budgets for needed physical and economic infrastructure and into the warmongering pockets of their military contractor cronies. That is an act of terror, and Minneapolis was neither the first nor most spectacular example of federally funded infrastructure (in this case, an Interstate highway bridge) suffering catastrophic failure. That would be the New Orleans levee failures of Hurricane Katrina, wherein more people probably died than in 9-11 (the official death toll is 1,836, but that doesn't count the equal number of people missing whose bodies are presumed washed out to sea) and an entire city permanently decimated. That is what terrorism looks like. Logically, the very people who should be in Guantanamo Bay's new torture prisons are the people who ordered them built. And unless some of the money now being poured into an illegal and immoral war is diverted into repairing America's crumbling infrastructure, tragedies like the one in Minnesota are going to become more and more common. --G.P.

Say, whatever happened to that urgent need to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct, anyway? --G.P.

Speaking of Katrina, a House Small Business Committee report last week revealed that the Bush administration, after promising last year to improve on its miserable record of awarding Gulf Coast reconstruction contracts to small and local businesses (instead preferring fat, no-bid, cost-plus contracts to large well-connected corporate cronies), has instead actually backtracked on its pledge to put more money into small and local companies in the last year.

Equally disturbing was the media coverage of the report--or lack thereof. The Washington Post buried an AP dispatch on its inside pages. The New York Times ran nothing at all on it. Neither did any of the major TV network news shows. It's bad enough that the Bush administration didn't, and still doesn't, care about the lives of people in New Orleans. But neither does our "official" media; they've moved on, aside from the occasional human interest story on how life sucks in a ruined city. Let's add a new verse: "Corporate media don't like black people." --G.P.

It's been tremendously entertaining to watch the obnoxious Republican congressional delegation from Alaska in full corruption scandal meltdown. Alaska has three congressional reps: Senators Ted Stevens (R-Sleazebucket) and Lisa Murkowski (appointed by her daddy when he was governor, before the voters routed him from office last year), and Rep. Don Young (R-Pipeline). The latest is that last week, both the FBI and the IRS raided Stevens' office in conjunction with an investigation into bribery and corruption, i.e. payments from the same pipeline company (VECO) that extensively remodeled Stevens' house gratis in 2000. Fox News (of all places) also reported last week that Stevens was the focus of a second criminal investigation, involving millions of federal dollars Stevens earmarked to the SeaLife Center (an Alaskan wildlife research center) that may have enriched a former aide.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reported that Young (already being investigated in an unrelated quid pro quo scheme involving Florida real estate) is also now ensnared in the VECO probe. And Ms. Murkowski might well have had VECO building her new house, too, but now we'll never know: she just had to sell back the prime riverfront real estate she bought from an Anchorage businessman for a new home last December when it was revealed that she bought it at about half market rate, i.e. a nice $170,000 housewarming gift.

I only hope that at the sentencing hearing after Stevens' conviction, Maria Cantwell is called as a character witness. --G.P.