‘STATE’ OF THE ART: RottenTomatoes.com decided to celebrate July Fourth by determining the most appropriate movie for each state. Obviously, some states have more potential choices than others. (Wisconsin’s pick is a short within a documentary).

Washington got Singles. Not the greatest film made here (or the greatest film set here), but a reasonable portrayal of what one generation thinks of as the scene that made Seattle famous.

I’VE OFTEN SAID I like McGraw-Hill’s books and magazines better than their records.

But now, the venerable publisher’s most famous print asset, BusinessWeek magazine, is up for sale, essentially to anybody willing to shoulder its losses. An article in Ad Age claims BW’s rivals Fortune and Forbes might face similar fates.

Remember, these are the outfits the rest of the magazine biz tried to emulate with their solid gold demographics, their cheerleading for BigCorps, and their niche of investment information (you know, the kind people are supposedly willing to pay for even online).

BILL MAHER has seen the mess that big money (or big potential money) has made out of health care, news, and other essential services, and declared on his HBO show that “Not Everything in America Has to Make a Profit.”
Maher cites a past time when the network news was a loss-leader division, medicine was small and personal, and “war profiteer” was an insult.

Of course, those were also the days before any TV channels charged subscription fees, but that’s beside the point.
The point being: Wall Street’s been vampirizing the nation’s lifeblood. And not just during the dot-com bubble and the housing bubble.

Earlier this year, I met an IT consultant whose clients have included a huge HMO provider. She insisted the health insurance companies aren’t to blame for America’s health-care cost crisis; it’s just the system that’s gone haywire.
I believe the insurance companies (some avidly, some more reluctantly) sold out to the profiteers over the past three decades, as the ultimate American financial icon changed from the Almighty Dollar to the Almighty Stock Price. Whole industries that weren’t intrinsically set up to reap windfall profits were retooled for just that purpose, just so they’d be considered great investments.

This meltdown is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to realign not just health care but the whole unstable superstructure of the economy.

THAT’S THE WAY IT USED TO BE: Folks my age are just about the youngest to remember Walter Cronkite’s run on the CBS Evening News, or at least most of it. Yes, there were only three networks then, with ABC a far third in news viewership and news budgets.

Star journalists in old-time radio had peppered their broadcasts with personality, and with personal opinions. The networks quickly declared that approach wrong for TV.

Instead, network TV news held to a strictly objective stance and a hierarchy of priorities. The stories picked, and the way they were told, were mostly the same as the wire-service items in local papers.

Cronkite had been a wire-service reporter during WWII, so he knew that form’s demands. His official yet personable demeanor made him a welcome presence at the dinner hour. Even as the world seemed to be crumbling in those 11 years between JFK’s death and Nixon’s resignation, Cronkite’s tone and that of the program surrounding him held constant.

It’s possible to re-create a solid square newscast like the one Cronkite ran. The whole thing would cost little more to make than The Daily Show.

But we’ve got Jim Lehrer for the official statements and mealy-mouthed analysis. We’ve got the current network newscasts to list what some corporate team thinks are the top events.

No, Cronkite was a figure of his time. What we need, and what many of us are groping to invent, is the new news.

IT GOT BUILT, AND THEY CAME: Yep, I was at the first weekend of Link Light Rail service.
It was a glorious two-day celebration of, well, of what?

Of yet another shiny New Seattle monument to world-class-osity? Not really.

To our modest li’l seaport village finally deserving to be called a Big League City? Nope.

To a cool new way to travel from downtown (almost) to the airport? Uh-uh.

Seattle’s first urban transit solution to run longer than 1.3 miles? Not even that.

No, it marked the true beginning of Seattle’s Century 21. Through what is essentially pre-car technology, we’ve launched the first practical step toward a post-car era.

And it’s swift, bright, clean, and fun too!

I’m surprised how few people, now and during Link’s years of construction, noted the utter appropriateness of the route’s principal siting on Martin Luther King Jr. Way—formerly Empire Way, named for the “empire builder,” James J. Hill—a railroad tycoon.

Like a lot of Western towns, Seattle was made, and nearly broken, by the railroads. When the Northern Pacific decided to build its own company town (Tacoma) instead of making Seattle its western terminus, Seattle boosters persuaded Hill to bring his rival Great Northern line here. (The NP and GN eventually merged into the Burlington Northern, now BNSF.)

As big rail built Seattle as a center of shipping and industry, local rail built the city’s neighborhoods.

 In a few cases this was literally true, as developers built trolley lines to service newly-built tracts.

Now, civic bureaucrats and “urban density” advocates hope that can happen again.

The operative phrase is “transit oriented development.” The idea is that, alongside the shiny new tracks, there should be shiny new residences, stores, and commercial structures. These would attract more riders for the trains, while adding economic activity to these neighborhoods.

(And they’d provide work for the construction biz, Seattle Democrats’ most loyal backers. And they’d help slow the tilt of the region’s population ratio toward the suburbs, which affects the city’s state and federal funding clout in many ways.)

So you get townhomes, mixed use projects, midrise apartment/condos, and the promise of more.

Some of these would be on tracts which were used as staging areas during Link’s long construction period. (It’s the taxpayers’ bad luck that the project bought this land while prices were going up, and is selling it as prices are going down.)

Light rail’s benefits shouldn’t just be for the new (read: upscale white) residents and workers, or for those current residents who happen to own saleable land.

For far too long, Seattle’s southeast quadrant (save for the Lake Washington waterfront) has been its ignored stepchild. It’s got a lot of households that didn’t fare well when the region as a whole boomed, and that aren’t doing well now.

I’d like development that enhances the lives of south Seattle’s current populace, and doesn’t merely displace it.

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