Crosscut articles of the past 10 days with the most clicks.
Crosscut articles of the past 10 days with the most reader comments.
Crosscut blog posts of the past 10 days with the most clicks.
Posted Thu, Mar 27, 10 a.m.
Years of planning and public relations work fail to hold the Center's place in the queue for capital improvements. Will two more years of waiting make things worse?
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Posted Fri, Mar 7, 1 a.m.
It began with a conversation last summer between former Sen. Slade Gorton and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. What emerges is a story of civic altruism and shrewd politics. Even so, after all the delays, the local team is playing a very weak hand.
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Posted Fri, Feb 22, 5 a.m.
The politicians keep changing the lineup and throwing elbows. Here's a look at the newest team and its prospects for keeping pro basketball at KeyArena.
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Posted Fri, Aug 24, 5 a.m.
The worse things look, the better the chances of a hairbreadth rescue for the team. Here's how the play is diagrammed.
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Posted Mon, Aug 20, 10 a.m.
The Mariners haven't been eliminated, the Storm and Sounders are headed for the playoffs, football season hasn't begun. Time to put your money down.
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Posted Mon, Oct 12, 6 a.m.
On this date five and 47 years ago, massive fronts took the region by force.
MOREPosted Wed, Oct 29, 6:14 p.m. 2008
In sending positive signals back to the NBA, the City of Seattle might be jumping the gun on its hopes for a share of the local hotel tax, which could also be needed for an expanded Convention Center.
MOREPosted Mon, Sep 22, 6:43 a.m. 2008
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.
MOREPosted Sat, Jul 5, 11:17 a.m. 2008
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.
MOREPosted Wed, May 21, 11 p.m. 2008
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.
MOREPosted Wed, Apr 23, 5:19 p.m. 2008
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.
MOREPosted Thu, Apr 10, 1 p.m. 2008
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.
MOREPosted Tue, Apr 8, 9:45 a.m. 2008
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.
MOREPosted Fri, Mar 14, 10:51 a.m. 2008
A wave of the pom-poms to Seattle Post-Intelligencer for its consistently incisive reporting on the Sonics' story, with today's analysis by Greg Johns another fine example. He notes that the votes were just not there in the Legislature (haven't been for four sessions), and that the bid by the Huskies for stadium money complicated the situation, since legislators (including Speaker Frank Chopp) would not have wanted to snub the UW while rewarding the BasketBallmers.
MOREPosted Wed, Mar 5, 3:21 p.m. 2008
When it comes to superheated potatoes, such as sports arenas and stadiums, our local politicians have learned to do their deals very quietly. And so, with a solution for the Sonics starting to come together, mum's the word as the dealmakers quietly work Olympia and the mayor's office puts Humpty Dumpty together. So, we scribes have to interpret hints and auguries. The appearance of developer Matt Griffin as a dealmaker, for instance, is a sign of seriousness. Griffin is a master of these complicated arrangements, combining private parties with government actors, as he did with Pacific Place and the downtown SAM-Wamu deal. Further, Griffin will give the Sonics-saviors better diplomatic relations with the Governor and the Legislature than Mayor Nickels would have.
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