Beautifying a 4-block stretch of a downtown Seattle street makes a lot of sense for a city with a $70 million deficit...

• Politicians want building/population density.
• Condo buyers/citizens want open spaces.
• A condo is cheaper than a house (you give up the property for a lower mortgage payment) but now these Belltown residents want "open space" (which they can't afford in the first place but now demand the city create something for them).

Sorry condo buyers, you made your choice. Like Sarah Palin, you can't have it both ways.

You wanted a lower mortgage payment. If you wanted open space you should have bought a house in a neighborhood, not downtown. Maybe a suburb. Tukwila's nice this time of year.

Citizens request that their politicians build them all the little niceties to make their life (condo/home) picture perfect (like a parks levy) but the hoops that the city establishes for itself are time consuming and wicked expensive.

Seattle spends itself into oblivion because the politicians can't say no to a spending request. Condo and homeowners don't have that option. If they spend themselves into oblivion they lose their condo or house and are living on a couch or in a car.

If Seattle--it's politicians and it's residents--don't find some fiscal discipline quickly they're going to be in worse shape than NBC.

I smirk with delight at the fuss liberal statists caused after Rahm Emanuel derided their plans to attack conservative Democrats over opposition to health care reform.

• It proves that liberal statists refuse to accept any criticism of them or their political beliefs. Their sole modus operandi is to shut down or shame anyone who disagrees with their political stance.
• It assumes that Emanuel is some sort of evil person who routinely trips children for the thrill of watching them fall and/or believes that some people are less valuable than others.
• It also assumes that Emanuel regularly calls people with developmental disabilities "retarded". I'm willing to bet if we hooked Emanuel up to a polygraph and asked him, under threat of additional waterboarding, if he ever called a mentally retarded person "retarded", his answer would be an unqualified "no".

I'm somebody who calls things or people 'retarded' when they don't make sense. We say "retard" because we're surprised that average or normal thinking people are that dense. It's called irony. We don't say stuff to purposefully to hurt people.

I'm somebody who calls things or people that act dumb, silly or strange "gay". Does that make me an insensitive homophobe? Doubtful, but I'll let you be the judge (and based on your propensity for hypersensitivity I'll be able to guess before the words curl up on your lips).

Like Emanuel, I'm not in the habit of walking up to gay people and saying "you're so gay". For starters, it's funnier when you give an inanimate object a human characteristic. For enders, does that make pop sensation Katy Perry a homophobe?

The sad reality, of the "R-word" and Rahm Emanuel, points up the fact that the extreme political left of the Democratic Party are outliers. Their vision of a statist, government-controlled economy and society are shunned by the majority of Americans. When they meet resistance they decry those people as 1.) bigots, 2.) discriminatory, 3.) insensitive, or 4.) hateful.

Rahm Emanuel need not apologize--unless, of course, YouTube videos of him start popping up where he's verbally abusing Special Olympics athletes with the dreaded "R-word".

These liberal statists (and please don't call them 'progressives' because that would be qualify as false advertising) need to look outside their cocoon once in a while but the only way they can compete is if they eliminate the competition.

Why can't commercials be this good 364 days outta the year??

The fact that I have to wait as long as I do to see an inventive, decent commercial is about as annoying as a Taylor Swift acceptance speech.

Let's face it, as Super Bowl commercials go, this was an off year but there were still some highlights. Doritos killed on their first two entries (barking dog and protective son of single mom), Betty White and Abe Vigoda should jack candy bar sales to the Regis and Kelly crowd (too bad anyone under 40 will completely miss why that pairing was funny).

The Lost parody was far and away the best. And considering the high caliber content we get from a certain light beer maker, it might be one of their best ever.

How difficult is it to come up with 3 or 4 more snappy marketing ideas a year people?? You sell beer. Everybody's buying this stuff.

P.S. I'm really looking forward to the debut of 3 calorie ultra-light Piss Beer which should be arriving at any second.

But back to my main premise. Does it really take copy writers and commercial directors 11 months to figure out how to make a decent commercial?

By this metric advertising and marketing people are the most unproductive people on the planet. They make the folks at the DMV look like a Chinese shoe factory.

These people are more unproductive than a narcolpetic farmer.

Sure it helps to have a national drama played out on TV screens for weeks to promote the Late Night wars (boy did that one have our party-goers buzzing), but certainly advetising agencies can be inspired more often than once a year. Right?

P.P.S. Letterman better be careful, with olive branches like this one he might end up winning a Nobel Peace Prize.

Also, if you're going to subject me to back-to-back pantsless fat-guy commercials, the least you could do is return from the break with some provocative sideline camera shots of the cheerleaders. Balance it out. That's all I'm saying.

If TV ratings are evaporating like Al Gore's credibility, you'd think that advertising agencies would step up their game to give us something worth watching.

This must be what Ronald Reagan was talking about with Trickle Down Theory.

All Super Bowl long I had to resist the urge to hit the >>> button on my DVR. I failed many times and had to hit the <<<. If TV and cable networks are smart, they're praying right now for a bumper crop of advertising graduates with some savvy to crank out better commercials to give us something worth watching on TV.

If I would have been following Mad Men, I'm sure I'd have a few more choice lines about the under-achieving fate of the TV ad game.

OK. Back to the Internet!

Please plan accordingly.

chart courtesy HolyTaco.com. Caution: contents flammable.

So if Health Care Reform includes a component to reduce costs, can we start with eliminating crop subsidies for non-Organic and non-naturally produced, um, produce and livestock?

If pesticides, preservatives, fertilizer, genetically modified foods, etc are adversely impacting health (i.e. cancer) shouldn't crop subsidies for those farmers be eliminated? Why would we pay farmers to farm stuff that would shorten our life and contribute to wicked bad medical costs such as cancer treatment?

As a sidebar, Bill Gates is high on GE foods to feed the world's poor and starving. I guess something is better than nothing but I'm not thrilled about rewarding agri-giants, which are soooooo heavily subsidized with taxpayer money, more pork for their icky engineering.

A journalism and Asian relations expert writes his laundry list of what's wrong with America and what works well in other countries. (Full Uni-plotter Manifesto here).

I've taken to keeping a double-entry list of what works and what doesn't, country by country. Unfortunately, it's become largely a list of what works elsewhere but doesn't work here.

Is this guy on the cutting edge or a blinded fool?

If this is the kind of mental acumen it takes to be dean of the Cal-Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, I'm looking forward to being selected the next dean of the Cal-Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism (or maybe this is why he's no longer the dean...)

He gushes about China and acknowledges their governmental/societal shortcomings but shockingly, as a guy with a journalism background, he fails to mention China's wide-spread censorship policies. That's a deal breaker right off the bat if you want me to consider the positives of China. If you can't promote your views in the market place of ideas, I don't want to be part of that country or society.

Also, China wouldn't exist without the US. Yes, Americans are cheap. We want a better bargain. If it wasn't for the Chinese government exploiting its workers to make stuff at ghastly low wages, Americans wouldn't be able to buy really cheap stuff.

I could run circles around this guy and I'll freely disclose I've never traveled to China or any of the other countries he lists but I have traveled outside the US albeit all in North and Central America. I have traveled extensively around the US. Maybe this particular Asian expert hasn't.

Thankfully he acknowledges that America is still the forefront of technology and innovation. So I'm thinking that means he's heard about the iPad and Undercover CEO. Good. That's important.

But he hits on a tragic flaw in the "I Wish the US Were More Like Other Countries"-centric world view:

The federal government, which is essentially paralyzed by partisanship and incapable of delivering solutions to the country's most pressing problems.

American partisan politics are so atrocious right now because government--local, state and federal--are so all-consuming that it reaches deeper and deeper into more and more aspects of our daily lives. It wasn't like that a generation ago.

If you want to improve government and reduce political partisanship, there is a simple choice to do it: shrink government.

He only laments the paralyzation because he doesn't think his political views (more socialism vis-a-vis China, European countries, etc) are being implemented quickly enough in America. Thus "we can't do".

Boo hoo.

Public elementary education, which in most states is desperately under funded and fails to deliver on its promise to provide all children with high-quality schooling.

Allow school choice. Charter school or vouchers bring more competition to the system. All boats rise in a high tide.

Airlines and the airports they service, which are almost Third World in equipment and service standards.

I guess he hasn't flown into Seattle. Either that or the 3rd World has some damn fine airports. Please, if you can name a safer way to travel than US airlines, I'd like to know what it is.

Infrastructure could certainly be better but heedless politicians consistently fail to take of what we have in exchange for something shiny and new they can tout to voters in a pathetic attempt to prove their worth (and beg for re-election).

Same could be said for rewarding greedy investors and credit abusers for imploding the banking system. Let the failures fail.

I shouldn't be ranting on a Friday, I should be looking forward to a weekend but this column has me feeling like Otter from Animal House.

Dammit. I hate when I leave good material on the table.

Last week I jokingly posted about broken News Year's Resolutions and in my haste to post, I completely forgot a whole page of notes I intended to use. Maybe I don't have ADD, maybe I'm just disorganized.

So here are some bonus resolutions.

The NCAA: just move the National Championship Football Game (like the SuperBowl!) back to February for TV sweeps month.

Congress: instead of forcing Americans to buy health insurance, just force the fattest among us on to NBC's Biggest Loser so they don't get diabetes or heart disease and drive up the cost of health care for the rest of us.

Andy Rooney: frickin' resign already. Have some dignity, man! The last time I saw somebody taking money for doing absolutely no discernably valuable work whatsoever was banks taking TARP money. You should be ashamed of yourself.

CBS: fire Andy Rooney.

Goldman Sachs: embezzel Andy Rooney's retirement account and give it as bonuses to your richest excutives.

The NBA: institute a new promotional gimmick, "Bring Your Tattoo to Work Day". Any fan that has more tatts than a player on your hometown team's roster gets free admission.

MTV: next ethnic group to piss off-->Iranians. Oh, wait. Already done that. (OK, what did I mean by that? I wrote those exact lines down in my notes a month ago and now I've totally forgotten what I meant. Does anybody know about MTV pissing off an Iranian group? Comment it up if ya do. For the life of me, I have no recollection of what I meant by that reference. Maybe I do have ADD)

Excellent write by The News Tribune's Peter Callaghan about another troubling development in Olympia.

This seems to correlate with the idea of entrenched career politicians. Or, maybe state lawmakers are big fans of Charlie Rich.

His music is inspirational...

So back to the problem with incumbents. A few weeks ago I posted about the incredibly large amount of long-time Olympia incumbents.

Today Callaghan confided to me by e-mail that he asked Olympia Republicans about the excessive use of closed door meetings and the Republican lawmakers apparently shrugged it off.

Maybe it's only journalists/media types that express dismay at the politicians who bend the rules to fit their needs. Maybe the Republicans shrug their shoulders at the Democrats' legislative control right now in hopes they'll manage to obtain majorities that will allow them to do the same, should the need arise, after future elections.

What Callaghan uncovered is symptomatic of the ruling-class politicians that protect their turf at all costs as they make a career of consolidating their power. If their actions were open to constant public scrutiny--via open meetings, they'd be subjected to extra criticism and evaluation which is what they seem intent on preventing.

Leave it to rock legend, AC/DC singer Brian Johnson, to be politically incorrect about starving kids.

Looks like Celebrity Death Match has a classic bout in the making.

(Johnson) said people don't want rich celebrities, like Bob Geldof and Bono, telling them to think of starving children.

I understand the power of charity and all that but it is pretty cool to see the rock-n-rollers rock the talk. Or maybe that Grammy the band just won has already gone to their head.

A lot of times we throw around the praise-worthy platitude, "he's a genius" and most of the time that's not actually true.

But comic Demetri Martin really is a genius. He wrote a 224 word palindrome--it reads the same forward as it does backward. Try beating that, Einstein.

He attended law school but realized he wasn't meant for the business world, he was meant for the show business world.

Here's some more genius from the 36-year-old New York City comic: Siamese twins are really interesting because they're the only people who can write a biography and an auto-biography at the same time.

Thursday Feb. 4th at 10p (EST/PST), Martin launches the second season of his splendid Comedy Central show "Important Things with Demetri Martin". You owe it to your cerebrum to check it out.

Until Thursday, here's a li'l bit more Demetri for ya.