But Can She Sing?

Hillary Clinton, on the trail in Iowa, tries her hand at the Star Spangled Banner:

The Confession

Yet another one of my coworkers thinks I was referring to him in a certain passage of my recent story on Jewish Seattle.

The last coworker to (mistakenly) think this was Christopher Frizzelle. This time it's my boss, Dan Savage, who wants to make a confession regarding this:

With God on Their Side

Today the Seattle Times has a front-page story about how local anti-gay crusader Ken Hutcherson has found a new ally in Russian-speaking Evangelicals from the former Soviet Union.

Janet I. Tu begins the story with this scene:

On a recent Sunday morning, at a strip mall in Kent, a few hundred people gathered to worship, rocking out to a band playing contemporary worship songs and cheering on the fiery pastor -- all in Russian.

This might seem an unlikely place for Ken Hutcherson -- Redmond's Antioch Bible Church senior pastor, who is known for outspoken views against homosexuality -- to look for allies in his effort to overturn a state law banning discrimination against gays and lesbians.

But then Pastor Andrey Shapovalov asked the children to come forward. Bless them, he said. "Pray that none of them become homosexuals or lesbians or have abortions or live a life of crime."

Of course, drilling homophobia into young people's heads can help set them up for committing crimes later in life, as I pointed out in this Stranger story about a gay-bashing conducted in 2004, in Seattle, on Gay Pride weekend, by three Russian-speaking Evangelicals from Bellingham.

The gay-bashers attended churches that preached against homosexuality, and were later convicted of assault and a hate crime for beating and stabbing former Seattle resident Micah Painter. Why did they attack Painter? Because, as a female companion who was with the attackers that night told police, Painter looked gay and being gay is "against our religion."

This incident, which was covered by the Times, is curiously absent from Tu's report on Russian-speaking Evangelicals teaming up with Ken Hutcherson to fight gay rights. The Times wrote about the gay bashing, it wrote about the trial of the attackers, it editorialized that "the best defense against hate crimes is a strong offense," and after my story came out, it picked up on what I identified as the central irony in the case: That a group of Evangelical Christians who had themselves fled religious persecution in the former Soviet Union were now using their newfound religious freedom to persecute gay Americans.

As the Times wrote in 2005:

[The attackers] came to the United States from Russia, in part, to escape persecution. So it was ironic, a King County Superior Court judge said yesterday, that they were awaiting sentencing for persecuting someone else.

Why is it so important that this three-year-old incident, and the ironies involved, be included in a story about Russian-speaking Evangelicals now teaming up with Ken Hutcherson?

Because, as is often said, and as my colleague Josh Feit said recently in another context, root causes are important. Preaching homophobia as religion can be a root cause of anti-gay violence, and in fact, here in Seattle, we had, in 2004, a gay bashing whose roots traced directly back to the homophobia preached in Russian-speaking Evangelical churches. That's worth noting in a story about Ken Hutcherson now stoking the anti-gay passions in these churches as part of a campaign to repeal the state's new gay civil rights law.

But while we're on the subject of root causes, here's something else that jumped out at me from Janet I. Tu's story. The whole alliance between Russian-speaking Evangelicals and Ken Hutcherson traces back to an event organized by Josh Feit — a Stranger-sponsored debate between Hutcherson and King County Executive Ron Sims.

The unusual alliance began last spring, after a debate on gay rights between Hutcherson and King County Executive Ron Sims. A local man saw it and approached Hutcherson to arrange a meeting with his uncle, an evangelical pastor in Latvia who heads a network of churches in 14 countries, including the U.S.

At the time of the Hutcherson-Sims debate, some people were uneasy about the event for exactly this reason.

Re: Hillary's "Conversation"

As predicted, Hillary's first webchat didn't produce any astonishing new positions from the Senator or any uncomfortable questions from out of the wild web yonder.

What it did produce is a ton of email addresses for the Hillary Clinton campaign (you had to give an email address in order to watch the chat), more grist for the continuing mainstream media coverage of Hillary's newly-launched presidential bid, a bunch of well-screened questions from the public, and a study in Clinton's on-camera demeanor.

Clinton was, as even her detractors have taken to noting, extremely competent. She was obviously in command of all the issues that came up (health care, terrorism, energy independence, etc.) and in her instinct toward intelligent inquiry and perpetual dialogue she provided a stark contrast to the man she wants to replace. But I don't know if she passed the likability test, the test of whether the average American wants to watch her on television (or on some computer's media player) for four years starting in 2008.

Perhaps it's unfair, but the inevitable comparison one ends up reaching for, when watching Hillary speak, is with her husband. And she is not as smooth or emotive as Bill Clinton, nor is she as warm. The question is whether, after eight years of Bush, Americans will settle for cold and competent. Andrew Sullivan frames it this way:

Hillary is essentially saying that we should trust her. She is giving us a clear signal of what a second Clinton administration would be like: all the centrism and responsibility of her husband’s eight years but without any of the charm.

Is that what Americans want? It seems that what they want is a form of escapism (in the form of Edwards), charisma (in the shape of Barack Obama), or integrity (in the guise of John McCain). But when the decision nears and the stakes, especially abroad, begin to seep in, might Hillary be right? Might they actually be yearning for dullness, competence and responsibility?

Hillary's "Conversation"

I'm going to be watching Hillary Clinton's live webcast at 4 p.m. (PST), not because I think there are going to be any earthshaking exchanges between her and the online public, but because I'm interested in how someone with as much campaign cash as Hillary uses the web, and because I'm particularly interested in how Hillary deals with the liberal netroots as she tries to secure the Democratic nomination.

From where I sit, the liberal netroots seem to be far more predisposed to "underdog" candidates like Obama and Edwards, and distrustful of (if not downright hostile toward) establishment Democrats like Hillary. It's about Hillary's slowness to repudiate her vote in favor of the Iraq War, sure, but it's also an insider-outsider thing. The Clintons, and their advisers, are the consummate Democratic insiders, the people behind those proverbial gates that Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, the founder of DailyKos, wants to be crashing.

It's worth noting, then, that today DailyKos, along with just about every major liberal political blog in the country (as well as the local blog Horsesass) is boasting an ad, paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign, promoting her series of webcasts. This shows two things. One, that Hillary's campaign knows how to get the attention of a sprawling medium with a still-uncertain business model: by using cash. And two, that Hillary's campaign is wary enough about the likelihood of either buying off, or winning over, the netroots that it's willing to go around them — is willing to pay for ads that drive the considerable traffic of the liberal blogosphere over to her web site, where she can speak directly, unfiltered, to the netroots (and collect email addresses that will allow her to continue speaking directly to these people throughout her campaign).

It'll be interesting to see how this strategy plays out.

On Being a Journalist With A Blog

David Carr has a great piece in the New York Times about the the way blogs are changing the life of the newspaper writer. Also discussed: the crack-like addictiveness of blog comments, the intimacy of electrons, and the harsh judgment of web analytics.

There has always been a feedback loop in journalism — letters to the editor, the phone and more recently e-mail messages. But a blog provides feedback through a fire hose. The nice thing about putting out a newspaper was that, at some point, the story was set and the writer got to go home. Now I have become a day trader, jacked in to my computer and trading by the second in my most precious commodity: me. How do they like me now? What about ... now? Hmmmm ... Now?

Um... How Did This Happen?

I came home last night, emptied my pockets, and found this. I swear I wasn't drunk. I swear I didn't pick this flyer up on my own, fold it three times, and then stash it away for future reference. Should I be flattered? Did someone slip this into the back pocket of my pants when I wasn't looking? Is reverse-pick-pocketing the new help wanted ad?

Totally Toklas

One of the coolest e-mails I received about my story on Seattle's Jewish Problem came from Gary Clark, a retired city worker and avid "metal detectorist."

A couple years ago, Gary, a member of the Cascade Treasure Club, was out hunting for treasure with his metal detector, waving it around a construction site on East Denny Way, between Broadway and Harvard, on Capitol Hill. Off went the metal detector and in the dirt Gary found this:



He knew he had something cool. It appeared to be a watch fob, it had a picture of George Washington on it, and it was inscribed: "Compliments of Toklas Simgerman & Co * Seattle, W.T."

The date stamped on the fob was 1888.

Wondering what exactly he had, and how much it was worth, Gary sent a query and a picture of his find to Western & Eastern Treasures, which describes itself as "the world's leading magazine for metal detectorists since 1966." In the September issue he received his answer:



Gary thought that was cool. He had a remnant from a Seattle clothing store that came into existence when Washington was still a territory. And it was potentially worth a whopping $200 (way better than the dropped pennies one assumes are constantly setting off his metal detector).

Then Gary read my story and learned that Ferdinand Toklas, the "Toklas" in Toklas Singerman & Co., was one of Seattle's early Jewish merchants, and also the father of Alice B. Toklas, the writer and partner of Gertrude Stein. He thought that was even cooler. Yesterday Gary brought the fob by The Stranger offices and my ace intern Sage Van Wing snapped the above photograph. I held the fob for a moment. It was light and nice to look at, and I couldn't imagine why anyone would have ever dropped it in the dirt.

By the Way

In case you missed it, free will is an illusion.

In short, the conscious brain was only playing catch-up to what the unconscious brain was already doing. The decision to act was an illusion, the monkey making up a story about what the tiger had already done.