Face it, folks: it's fall in Seattle, and along with cooler nights, leaves changing color, and the beginning of football season, fall also marks the annual Scion independent film series. Yes, it's corporate-sponsored lifestyle marketing aimed at the hip youth demographic, and yes, they just want the kids to buy their damn cars, but we're willing to shill for it when 1) it's free and 2) the films shown are actually worth seeing. The series kicks off tonight with Heavy Metal in Baghdad, the first full-length film made by the good people at Vice: more ›

A Bellingham man accused of deserting his Army unit in 2001 has been arrested by U.S. Border Officers. Nicholas Olson, now 29, was arrested in Sweetgrass, Mont., on July 3rd as he was trying to re-enter the country from Canada. He will be extradited to the Army to face charges of desertion. more ›

So says the P-I:

U.S. troops in Muslim nations where pig-eating is a religious no-no, have been requesting the local startup's product, dreamed up by two guys who stayed up late into the night brainstorming in 2006, to sprinkle on their MREs and anything else edible overseas.

According to federal prosecutors, Washington State representative Jim McDermott's 2002 trip to Iraq was secretly financed by Saddam Hussein's intelligence agency. McDermott, a strong opponent of the war in Iraq, traveled to the country in October 2002 with two other democratic representatives. The trip occurred during the zenith of President Bush's push for the war, while McDermott and his fellow travelers urged for a diplomatic solution to be found. more ›

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Not that there's anything remarkably surprising about this. Most of us here in this hippy haven understand full well that the War in Iraq was forged under false pretense, and there have been plenty of news stories in the past five years to back up our suspicions. more ›

Despite being narrated by Sean Penn, it's fairly lo-fi -- a cool-headed interview with media critic Norman Solomon intercut with film and video footage to illustrate salient points on how gullible/acquiescent the American public is when it comes to run-ups to war and how supine the media generally is until after the fact, when lone, contrarian voices are celebrated as if "we knew it all along." more ›

Starting tomorrow night, SIFF Cinema is showing Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust, a documentary that examines Hollywood's relationship and depiction of one of the 20th Century's defining events. more ›

There are a lot of things we can see being seized at the border between Canada and the United States: handguns with the serial number filed off, bricks of heroin, briefcases with the radioactivity sign on the side. Hard drives we'd expect to make it through, but unfortunately we'd be wrong. The guy bringing the masters of the songs Chris Walla recorded in Vancouver back down to Seattle had the drive containing them yanked by Homeland Security. more ›

Next up was Juno, the latest comedy from Jason Reitman. We loved his first feature, Thank You for Smoking, and had heard nothing but good buzz about this flick, which is kinda Knocked Up meets Superbad, if Judd Apatow stopped focusing so much on male friendships and paid more attention to the pregnant girl. As the titular acid-tongued, preggo high schooler, Ellen Page keeps on getting better and better, and the rest of the cast (JK Simmons, Allison Ranney, Jennifer Garner, and Jason Bateman, reunited here with his TV son, sweet baby Michael Cera) ain't no slouch neither. A couple minor quibbles: if anything the film is too cute by half. We don't need pop culture references for the sake of pop culture references: "No, It's Morgan Freeman. I'm here to collect some bones." And we certainly don't need a quirky folk song introducing every goddamn scene (Wes Anderson much?). Still, the film was ultimately very moving -- we always appreciate it when a foul-mouthed movie turns out to have some heart. more ›

Holy poop, Barack Obama raised a record $31 million dollars over the last three months. more ›

Watching David Hare's dramatization of the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq last night at ACT, we were reminded of an email exchange we had that summer with an old college friend. Our friend, a Brit, was at the time starting her career as a history teacher, and if we recall correctly, we wrote her something to the effect of, "You know why World War I started, you know why World War II or Vietnam or Korea or the Falklands started...but in ten years, when your students ask you, 'Why did we invade Iraq?', what are you going to say? What's the explanation going to be?" Her despairing response: "They already are asking. And I don't know what to tell them." more ›

POLEMIC: Understated, respectful, sober -- these are words that describe someone else besides Christopher Hitchens, who we suspect would beat you senseless with his shoe if it meant that he could own "iconoclastic." more ›

BOOK CRUSH: Librarian Nancy Pearl´s latest book is Book Crush, a guide to books you loved when you were growing up. How does she know? Head over to the launch party and find out. more ›

Providing yet more evidence why you should avoid documentaries with far more than a 35-millimeter pole, the producer of Iraq in Fragments today released a gag-inducing "open letter" to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences calling on them to apologize because someone made a joke he didn't like. more ›

"The Decider" will be yakkin at you tonight, beginning at 6pm PST, in a nationally-televised address expected to last for about 30 minutes. The topic: The Iraq War, which President Bush wants to try to win--understandably so, as his other option is to pull out and go down in history as the guy with sole responsibility for the senseless deaths of 2,997 American soldiers (as of Saturday). That's exactly the same number of people as died on 9/11. (Guess what, Osama? We can get 3,000 people killed for no reason too! SNAP!) more ›

Since there's a pretty heavy overlap between the set of people who read this site and the set of people who listen to KUOW, we're going to guess that most of you already heard of Conservatize Me by KUOW's John Moe, despite our inexcusable failure to review this entertaining, thought-provoking book. For those who haven't, profuse apologies. more ›

In the old days, when men were men and trees fit in the ground, newspapers were no less biased than the average KVI caller. Most were organs of one political party or the other, and as a result were very entertaining. more ›

Joe Lieberman may have a very bad day. more ›

Kids looking for a summer job might want to consider running against Maria Cantwell. more ›

Those design-obsessed types over at Coudal Partners have just recently posted Field Tested Books, an online compendium of book reviews by lots of bookish (and blogish) people. Not just your ordinary reviews, these focus on books read in specific places and the impact the locale had on the reader's experience (hence, Coudal likes to refer to them as "experience reviews" instead). more ›

A couple of national heavies just blew through town to promote either side of our coming senate race and the most interesting things to come out of both visits was the dissent. Maria Cantwell got called out for the Iraq war votes that she's sticking to while she was sharing the stage with Barak Obama. John McCain's finest Seattle moment happened on the radio after his McGavick event. A caller asked about the shady background of a recently hired McCain senior aide to which McCain had no response. Rather, his response was that the guy in question worked for Bush in 2004. Oh yeah, that's clear evidence of a sterling character around Seattle. more ›

Another Day in Baghdad, a play written by Iraq War veteran and playwright David A. Tucker II, opens tomorrow night, February 11th, at Stage One theater on the campus of North Seattle Community College. BTW, tickets are $what-you-can-pay. more ›