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. The maximum penalty a U.S. soldier can face for desertion during a time of war is death. While the U.S. has not......

What else besides Bacon Salt could possibly lift your spirits after a long day of serving your country? 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.The result? Operation Bacon Salt—an organized effort by the makers of......

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. Yesterday, federal prosecutors outlined how......

ART: We hear Goldmine Shithouse is visiting the Grey Gallery, but you wouldn't know it from either of their sites. The GMSH calendar ends in February, while the Grey Gallery still invites you to their January grand opening. Thank god they have booze to draw you in anyway. Now, about the scruffy guests they're expecting. Goldmine Shithouse is an artist cooperative: They focus primarily on painting, drawing and collage, and have extended into the......

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. But, now there's a study showing that, in fact, it was the confluence of 935 lies the Bush administration told in order to set the stage for......

We caught War Made Easy at the Film Forum last night, but we weren't in the big hurry we thought because its run has been extended through Monday, the 21st. 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......

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. Growing up Jewish in New York City, we were introduced to The Diary of Anne Frank at age 9. We quickly became fascinated by her story (our copy of the book is in tatters we read it so often) and by the subject of the......

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......

Monday started even earlier than Sunday with the Coen Brothers' heavily-touted No Country for Old Men. The elegantly slow-moving picture (care of cinematographer Roger Deakins) lives up to the hype, so much so that we can take it as their formal cinematic apology for their abysmal duo Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers. Ethan, Joel, we forgive you. Especially if it means that you won't sic scary-as-hell psycho-killer Javier Bardem on us. Next up was Juno,......

Holy poop, Barack Obama raised a record $31 million dollars over the last three months. That's what happens when your rival continually justifies her vote for the Iraq War, and chooses a terrible song as her campaign theme, "You, me, and Celine are gonna change this country." Among all of that money was a $100 dollar check from Auburn school teacher Angela Berg, which happened to be the 250,000th donation to Obama's campaign. David Postman......

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......

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." Here's the pro-Iraq War Hitch on Michael Moore: "Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of 'dissenting' bravery." Here's......

Monday 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. 7-8:30pm // Seattle Central Public Library Microsoft Auditorium // FREE PETER BEAGLE SPEAKS: For the Fantastic Fiction Salon, fantasy author Peter Beagle (The Last Unicorn, Tamsin, and The Innkeeper's Song) teaches "Dialogue Says it All." 7pm // Hugo House......

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. The offender? Jerry Seinfeld who, to quote the aggrieved documentarian "poked fun" at documentaries in his introduction of the five nominees for Best Doc., and......

"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......

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. The #1 thing we enjoyed about this book is that it's the first we've read of this genre......

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. Then some wisenheimer got the idea that newspapers should be unbiased, and as a result you get the awful flabby boring unreadable product that is the modern American daily newspaper, with headlines like......

Joe Lieberman may have a very bad day. Polls say he'll lose the Democratic primary to Ned Lamont, who besides being filthy rich after inventing the shoe, is also using local political consulting firm Moxie Media to design his mail (whoop-whoop). Lieberman has angered left-leaning Nutmeggers with his support of the Iraq War. Our own Maria Cantwell also voted for the war and has refused to back away from that vote. Yet, instead of fighting......

Kids looking for a summer job might want to consider running against Maria Cantwell. Not only will you find employment and receive a high salary, but the work is seasonal, meaning you'll be at your desk when the first bell of the school year rings in November. Two former challengers for this September's Democratic primary have ended their campaign, and the next thing they knew had a job on Cantwell's payroll. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. Mark Wilson who......

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). Local boy done good, John Moe, has his Raymond Carver college moment in Walla......

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......

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. Seattlest had a sneak peek at the show and was impressed with the use of sound and imagery. Tucker's own pictures are incorporated into the play through fancy use of projection and screens. One of the most......