Mayor Greg Nickels talked tough this week about his intention to implement the 29 reforms suggested by his panel on police accountability. The panel was a response to criticism of the SPD’s handling of the cases of Officers Greg Neubert and MIchael Tietjen, who were accused of planting drugs and whose penchant for making statements of dubious veracity led the King County Prosecutors office to drop numerous cases in which they were involved and add them to the list of untrustworthy officers. It was also a response to criticism that Nickels was blindly backing Chief Gil Kerlikowske, whose reluctance to discipline officers and interference with the Neubert and Tietjen investigation led the Seattle/King County NAACP to demand his resignation.

Most of all, the panel was a presciently clever political move by Nickels, who once again is turning a liability into a strength by co-opting one of a potential 2009 opponent’s key issues: should he decide to throw his hat in the ring, it’ll be hard for Nick Licata to beat the accountability drum if Nickels is doing battle with the police union, just as it’ll be tough for Peter Steinbrueck to boast of his work towards a surface-transit option for the waterfront now that Nickels is supporting it and stealing headlines with an “over my dead body” approach to viaduct reconstruction. (It remains to be seen whether there’s anyone to make a viable anti-development or pro-law and order challenge to the mayor.)

On to today’s news: Nickels got more ammunition for his looming battle with the Seattle Police Officers Guild with the publication of the Seattle PI’s second piece this week on the SPD’s (and other departments’) reluctance to discipline officers for misconduct (the first was on officers who make false statements). In today’s excellent report, Eric Nalder documents the SPD’s handling of accusations of excessive force and finds that the accusations are rarely sustained and the officers even more rarely disciplined. (For some reason, people keep attacking the swinging foot of Officer Aaron Parker.) While it’s true that using insufficient force can lead to more violence, most of these cases don’t appear to this untrained mind to be anywhere near the line of ambiguity.

It remains to be seen whether Nickels will back up his tough talk with tough actions. While we wait to find out, Licata will have his so-Seattle meta-panel examine how best to implement Nickels’ panel’s recommendations. If they want to steal his office, or even just keep him in check, Nickels’ adversaries are gonna have to tighten their game.

When word came down of Rudy Giuliani’s departure from the Republican primary race, I thought of his chief foreign policy adviser, Norman Podhoretz, and Axl Rose’s tortured wail from “Sweet Child o’ Mine” echoed in my head:

Where do we go? Where do we go now? Oh oh oh oh…

Indeed, where does Norman go? We’re down to the Final Four, there’s plenty of votes to be cast, and Iran remains uninvaded by democracy or American bombs. Norm finds himself in a position similar to that of Tiki Barber, who left football a year too early and now must watch his erstwhile teammates play for a Super Bowl title.

Sugar cube?

Yup, Norm hitched his battle wagon to the wrong war horse. Will he be forced to sit on the sidelines as a result? It’s not like Norm or his buddies to hype a war and then sit it out.

Ever get the feeling these modern sons of Sparta would’ve found themselves on the wrong side of a cliff back in the day?

While three of the remaining candidates can boast of statements or votes that hint at an answer to Norm’s hopes and prayers, there is one whose hawkishness is backed up by an actual record of going to war: Senator John McCain. The bellicose Arizonan should’ve been Norm’s choice all along. After all, Rudy’s real enemies are everyone who disagrees with him and/or got capped by New York’s Finest. By contrast, John was into bombing fools before bombing fools was cool.

So how ’bout it, Norm? Pride’s a bitch, but you gotta swallow it. Give John a call. It’s too late for Tiki, but you’ve still got a chance.

It’s no secret that the inordinate length of the primary campaigns and the saturation of media coverage leads to some amusing and far-fetched commentary, but Goldy’s post at Horsesass, comparing Rudy Giuliani’s campaign to The Producers’ Max Bialystock is particularly creative and entertaining. The only problem? Rudy’s “Florida strategy” became a strategy only when the previous strategies failed.

It appears that SPD parking enforcement has a new weapon in its arsenal. (It’s the first I’ve seen of it, at least.)

Sonics 88, Defending NBA Champion Spurs 85

The losing streak is over, friends, and it ended in bizarre fashion:

-The Sonics turned the ball over only six times. I swear there have been games this year where they had that many in one possession. Credit in particular to Luke Ridnour, who still can’t shoot for shit or guard NBA point guards (or NBA anythings, for that matter), but who made some great passes down the stretch, including a crowd-pleasing no-looker to Durant for a dunk.

-Wally Szcerbiak and Kurt Thomas apparently drank Gatorade’s new “Fountain of Youth” flavor before the game. Thomas blocked two shots and also scored on consecutive finger-roll-resulting drives. But the absolute shocker was when the typically concrete-shoed Wally Z drove baseline on Manu Ginobili and dunked on Tim Duncan. That’s not a misprint, folks. It really happened.

Of course, no matter all that, they’re still the same Sonics from the block:

-A day after Wally went to the press to complain about Durant’s shot selection, Durant put up 19 shots in 36 minutes, including the go-ahead jumper, which he made with roughly 30 seconds left in the game.

The two gunners embraced after the game as they celebrated the victory, which Durant said felt like a championship. Savor the flavor, Sonic fans, cuz these Supes won’t be du jour too often.

Remarkably, we got this far into the season without any notable intrasquad drama. But a jumper-happy teenager with about as much conscience as Lee Atwater was bound to chafe on his teammates at some point. The P-I’s Gary Washburn reports that team “veterans” are complaining about Durant’s recent shot selection. Only one veteran went on record. Guess who:

“Yeah, I think so,” was Wally Szczerbiak’s response when asked if the shots could be better distributed. “I was just observing the stat sheet (Sunday) and no one got double-digit shots other than Kevin. And the coaching staff is asking a 19-year-old to do a lot. Let’s put it that way.

Sunday night was “Kids at the Key” to celebrate Squatch’s 15th birthday, for which the hirsuite mascot was joined by swarms of little ones and nine of his closest mascot friends. (He’s now old enough to take driver’s ed–to think he’s been riding that Harley all these years without a license!) So many enthusiastic and uncritical attendees made for a Key that rocked like few in recent memory. After a first half Nick Collison tip jam, I saw a young girl in a pink and purple velour warm-up jacket celebrate so vigorously in the aisle that she tripped on a stair and crashed into an adjacent seat.

As for the game, the Sonics provided plenty to cheer about, taking the Kings down to the wire in a heartbreaking 103-101 defeat (that’s 14 straight, if you’re counting). Johan Petro continued his solid play, Wally Z displayed amazing intensity for a 30-year-old with bad ankles and a great contract on a losing team, and Kevin Durant compensated for his poor night shooting by willing himself to the free throw line, repeatedly flinging his 19-year-old bones into the veteran muscle defending the basket.

(Another Durant anecdote: as he walked by the scorer’s table after a late fourth quarter timeout, he high-fived a couple of kids sitting in the front row. From twenty rows back, they looked to be in their early adolescence. It struck me that Durant is much closer to their age than to that of some of his teammates.)

Nevertheless, despite the energy of the night and some great play by the young Supes (the highlight being a steal by Durant who then passed to Green for the tomahawk dunk, thus endangering the girl in the velour jacket), it wasn’t enough to beat Kevin Martin. The Kings’ super-skinny shooting guard scored five points in the last 17 seconds on one free throw and two improbable shots, the last being a coast-to-coast drive for a buzzer-beating baseline jumper after an even more improbable game-tying-three by Damien Wilkins, who’d just come in after a long stretch on the bench. Thanks to lots of offseason work, Martin has gone from late-first-round afterthought to outright star. Should the young Sonics follow his lead, the team could be good before tonight’s kids are old enough to know that it’s not.

13 straight L’s. A Baker’s dozen. A Vin Baker’s apathy.

L, L, L, L, L, L, L, L, L, L, L, L, L.

Read the above line about thirty times over and you’ll have a sense of the tedium of tonight’s Sonics game against the Atlanta Hawks. The Supes lost 99-90, though it wasn’t as close as the score.

The inert and/or distracted fans (like players, like fans) who deemed it worthwhile to stick around for the fourth quarter were rewarded with a small burst of good basketball by the Supes. The unquestioned highlight was an awkward but rousing coast-to-coast, and-one drive and dunk by Buzzer Beater and North Beach Elementary favorite Johan Petro. The lithe Frenchman acquitted himself well–9 points, 6 rebounds, and 5 blocks in 22 minutes–making a compelling case for a more regular spot in the rotation. Perhaps he was energized by the granola bar he ate on the bench.

Playing in front of a semi-home crowd of Seattleites, Bremertonians, and Bremelos, Marvin Williams had a career-high 33 points.

PJ Carlesimo complemented his beige blazer with a burnt orange mock turtleneck.

Fraudulent transactions by a trader named Jerome Kerviel have cost one of France’s biggest banks, Societe Generale, $7.1 billion (4.9 billion euros), and Kerviel is now on the lam. According to the story in the New York Times:

The trader “had taken massive fraudulent directional positions in 2007 and 2008 far beyond his limited authority,” the bank said.

“Aided by his in-depth knowledge of the control procedures resulting from his former employment in the middle office, he managed to conceal these positions through a scheme of elaborate fictitious transactions.”

Initially, it reminds of the individual con man movies like The Hoax and Catch Me if You Can, but this quote–”one person could engineer it, but how could one person finance it?”–from a bank’s chief executive hints at a high-finance Ocean’s Eleven.

My good friend and Haymaker & Sally collaborator Jason “Reidster” Reid recently spent some time filming his home turf of Georgetown. The below music videos are the result.

The first, shot on Martin Luther King Day and set to the tune from Hawaii 5-0, shows costumed representatives from Liberty Tax Service canvassing a strip mall. Reid encountered this bizarre sight from his back window and figured it was worth capturing for posterity.

Reid also made this dirge for the recently demolished Rainier Cold Storage building, whose haunting remains he filmed at night: