Seattle Storm

The Seahawks ruin a perfect record

Look at it this way: If Seattle had lost its National Football League game to St. Louis Sunday, Sept. 21, it would have meant that the combined late-summer losing streak of the Seahawks, the Mariners, and the University of Washington football team would have reached 17: 0-11 for the M's, 0-3 for the Huskies, and 0-3 for the Hawks. So it's something of a civic triumph that the Seahawks didn't fail local fans, flattening the Rams 37-13, bumping the recent male-sport loss-win number to 1-16. Throw in a Seattle Storm Sunday-night 64-50 playoff win against the Los Angeles Sparks and the town is on something of a sports roll.

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As the Sonics leave town, it may help the arts

In all the reporting about the Sonics decision, we tend to overlook the intense clamoring over a taxing source, the so-called "stadium taxes," that bedevils the politics. A lot of groups want to lay claim to those taxes, which are supposed to go away after the Kingdome, Safeco Field, and Qwest Field are paid off, but are really catnip to politicians for their pet causes. The taxes have two attractions: they are not really an "increase" if you just extend their life, and they fall mostly on visitors, who don't vote locally. One of the main supplicants is the arts. Thereby hangs an interesting story.

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The newcomer name game

The Chinese have a saying: "One move is like two house fires." It's very disorienting to be in a new place, even if you moved within the U.S. and can therefore depend on the cultural differences between your previous burg and Seattle to be, relatively speaking, minimal. I've lived in the Northwest for nearly six years and Seattle for almost three, and I'm still doing double-takes over little things, such as proper nouns.

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Does Clay Bennett's 'sweet flip' exonerate him?

Here's an interesting mind game. What if the Oklahoma City owners of the Sonics have been behaving honorably all along? News today of an email that envisioned a "sweet flip" of the team, keeping it in Seattle, makes such a theory somewhat plausible. Suspend your media-whipped anger at the Oklahomans for a few minutes, and follow me on a shrewd tale of modern capitalism.

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Why the Sonics should go away

Brave is the mortal who takes on Art Thiel, the Post-Intelligencer's ace sports columnist. Advocates for a Legislative fix for Husky stadium still think Thiel's withering column about that request sank the idea in a day. (Thiel dislikes the commercialization of college sports and has become the scourge of Huskies.) And now, he's arguing to defy the Oklahoma Sonics group until the last lawsuit dies. "Just say no," contends Big Art.

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Steve Ballmer: still in the basketball game?

The on-again, off-again saga of saving the Sonics and KeyArena has taken another turn. Apparently the drop-dead date of April 10 for having a deal for the Steve Ballmer ownership group is really just a coma-threat. The group of heavy-hitter owners-in-waiting will simply go into hibernation once the Sonics decamp to Oklahoma City.

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