The global and national outcry at the firing-squad execution this summer of Ronnie Lee Gardner in Utah, the last state where that form of capital punishment is possible, could presage a similar uproar directed at Washington State should the nation’s last gallows be prepared for use. Eight men on death row in Walla Walla await that possibility.

But at least some of the anger seemed focused on the fact Utah still has an “Old West” way of executing its condemned criminals, who are able to choose the firing squad over lethal injection.

Since Washington is the last state where a condemned man may choose to die by hanging, it’s pretty clear that the same sort of charge of “barbaric Old West justice” could rain down on the state should the day come for one of those eight men.

Thoughts about Gardner’s execution and an interview with a Seattle area student doing a paper on capital punishment brought back memories of the 1963 hanging of Joseph Chester Self, which I covered for United Press International as a young reporter. Self’s would be the last hanging in Washington State for more than 30 years.

The state doesn’t have a gallows in the Old West style, but rather a large room at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, a “death chamber” awaiting possible use should any condemned man choose to hang rather than receive a lethal injection.

Only men have been executed in Washington and of the 14 who have gone to their deaths since 1949, 13 were Caucasian and one was Hispanic. Two of the last four men to suffer the death penalty chose hanging, the last being Charles Campbell in 1995.

Washington’s governors have routinely passed on the opportunities over the years to interfere with the death penalty being carried out.

Mike Lowry, who was then in his first year as Washington governor, was the last to weigh whether to permit a condemned man to hang, although two men were subsequently executed by lethal injection during Gary Locke’s time as governor.

I asked Lowry to recall that hanging and his thoughts about it. In the process of answering, he disclosed that a personal visit with the condemned man at the state penitentiary had been part of what he referred to as “the considerable time” he spent reviewing Charles Campbell’s case.

“I received delegations from opponents of capital punishment and, of course, from family and friends of the people he murdered,” Lowry recalled. “In the end, I could not justify in my own mind reversing the 13-year legal process that included all the appeals that were made by his defense lawyers exercising his constitutional rights.

“One of the reasons I did not commute Mr. Campbell's sentence to life without possibility of parole is that there was a very legitimate fear that he might try to kill a prison employee or other inmate,” Lowry added.

Lowry conceded it’s possible there will be other executions in Washington State, noting:  “I feel for whoever is governor at that time and I hope he or she will explore every opportunity to find a solid justification to commute the sentence to life without possibility of parole.”

The case of Joe Self was different. When he made the short walk from his death-row holding cell to the door of the chamber, he had long-since converted to Catholicism and he had willed his eyes to an eye bank.

Self was convicted and sentenced to die for shooting a cab driver to death in a $15 robbery, the final criminal chapter in a life of otherwise petty crimes.

Spenser, the young man who contacted me for the interview for his project, told me he and a friend had decided to do a paper on the death penalty and had searched the Internet but found “mostly factual, neutral stuff. It was difficult to find sites that gave us opinions.”

I shared with him the details of the June evening of 1963 when two other young journalists and I were among the group of about 35 people on hand for Self’s hanging, by tradition just past midnight, “the first minute of the new day.”

Self, Warden Bobbie Rhay, a catholic priest who had become Self’s regular death-row visitor, and a couple of guards entered a door to the cement balcony against the back wall of the chamber, with the witnesses looking up from below. They walked to the center of the platform and stopped as Self stood above the steel door through which he would fall to his death when the door was sprung open.

Rhay asked Self if he had any final words and the condemned man replied: “Ask me if I’ve said my prayers, warden.”

With that, a hood was pulled over Self’s head. A straightjacket pinned his arms to his body. Rhay flipped a wall switch, signaling three men in a room below the death chamber that they should each flip the switches in front of them. Only one of the switches activated the trap door, through which Self fell in a moment, his neck snapping before onlookers could even grasp what they had witnessed.

That only three young reporters, all print journalists in their early ‘20s, were on hand (no radio or television news people and no seasoned reporters) to cover the execution was a commentary on the relative importance of a hanging then, though there was certainly media coverage in the weeks prior. After all, hangings occurred on average about once a year. But Self’s would be the last for decades.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Washington’s death penalty unconstitutional in 1972, but voters reinstated it, addressing the court’s concerns, in 1975.

By the time 30 years after Self that another death row inmate was to be hanged, the attention was widespread and went on for weeks, and all three of us who had been at Self’s execution found ourselves being interviewed by various media on “what it was like.”

Coincidentally, a week after Gardner’s execution, I got a card from Spenser that said: “Thank you for the interview. I got an A on my project.”

Kris Nielsen, whose Pegasus-Global Holdings Inc. has a client list that reads like the who’s who of the power and oil and gas industries internationally, predicts that the disastrous Gulf of Mexico spill will be the oil and gas industry’s Three Mile Island.

And because of the role Nielsen, chairman and president of the firm, and Patricia Galloway, his wife and the company’s CEO, play in guiding long-term strategy for an array of industries, it’s a prediction that’s likely to gather increasing attention as the Gulf disaster unfolds.

“With the recent BP disaster, the oil and gas industry will be forever changed, much as the nuclear power industry was 30 years ago,” suggests Nielsen, whose long career has brought him an international reputation as a risk-management expert.

Nielsen and Galloway come by the Three Mile Island allusion through experience with nuclear power, both in the ‘80s as the TMI aftermath washed over the industry, and now as the industry has finally come back. 

They were hired to try to save the Washington Public Power Supply System(WPPSS), a combine of public and private power entities created to build five nuclear plants, from the eventual collapse that became the largest municipal bond default in U.S. history.

And they continue to consult with power companies on nuclear energy, having worked with Florida Power & Light on nuclear plants and with Georgia Power on the first two Vogtle nuclear plants and are involved with two others that will be among the first new  plants since TMI.

It was during a London “road show” for long-time client Deutsche Bank in the weeks after the Gulf drilling disaster that Nielsen first likened the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe’s fallout to Three Mile Island. Deutsche Bank had asked Nielsen and Galloway to discuss the oil spill and its implications for BP investors in particular.

Until now, their comments have been highly visible and sought after mainly for those in the industries to which they provide guidance and counsel, but pretty much off the radar screen of the general public and the mainstream media.

However, as the Gulf spill’s long-term implications for the oil and gas industry, and for the fortunes of the company responsible, begin to sink in, their visibility may ratchet up exponentially.

Of late, they have been on a two-hour video conference from their company’s unusual rural headquarters each Monday morning with Deutsche Bank executives regarding Nielsen’s and Galloway’s ongoing assessment of the impact of the nation’s worst environmental disaster on the industry, and on the outlook for BP.

It’s a seemingly unlikely company headquarters from which they offer guidance and counsel to major companies around the world, write articles for key industry journals and organize conferences and prepare for speaking appearances.

The western-style log-faced building hard against the base of a treed hillside at the end of a long, dusty road a dozen miles east of Cle Elum, WA, officially replaced their former headquarters near Princeton, NJ, in 2007, although they’ve basically operated out of the Seattle area most of the past decade.

It’s from there on their Unionville Ranch, named for the New Jersey winery they founded and own, that Nielsen and Galloway communicate by phone, e-mail and videoconference with leading executives when they’re not on a plane to somewhere for face-to-face visits. The location is further evidence that entrepreneurs can work where they want to live.

When I asked Nielsen specifically about what he thinks lies ahead for BP, he replied that a  break-up of the company was possible, but would be an extreme outcome.

In a recent newsletter, Nielsen said the regulatory impact, which he predicted “will slowly spread throughout the world,” will impact all areas of the industry, “including the oil and gas services sector, not just domestically but internationally as well.”

But he added that “the oil and gas industry and the U.S. government now have a unique opportunity to ‘get it right’ and getting it right means looking at past disasters and determining how we short circuit idiocy and blend reasonable regulation with reasonable responses from the industry.”

Galloway joined the firm three years after her graduation from Purdue with honors and an engineering degree in 1978, soon became a shareholder, and recalls arriving in Seattle for the first time to prepare for her work with WPPSS and thinking, “so why don’t I live here?” They soon did, buying a condo in Seattle in 1987, the year they were married.

Nielsen and Galloway offer a note of optimism in suggesting that industry and government, by applying the lessons of Three Mile Island to dealing with the oil and gas industry, “should be able to shorten the timeline to regulatory and behavioral excellence from 30 years to 10 years.”

For this to happen, an earnest effort on the part of government to avoid over-regulation must be matched by an earnest effort by the private sector to pursue safety, “not as a result of government regulation but as a by-product of corporate culture,” they suggest.

“In the next decade, the oil & gas industry and companies will become good corporate citizens instead of the pariahs that they are perceived as being today—exactly as the nuclear power utilities have become 30 years after TMI,” Nielsen wrote in his newsletter.

Carol Vipperman, whose organization has championed economic ties with Russia since before the breakup of the old Sovet Union, thinks the Russian-spy flap could turn out to enhance rather than diminish relations between the U.S. and its one-time super-power enemy.

“The leaders of both nations, in moving quickly to resolve this, are saying our relationships are far more important than these kinds of distractions,” said Vipperman, president of the Seattle-based Foundation for Russian-American Economic Cooperation (FRAEC).

Her comments related to the swap of a group of Russian spies for four people held in Russia as spies for the West, an exchange that occurred last week in what one official described as being done “with electrifying speed,” having moved from disclosure to spy- swap in less than two weeks

Vipperman’s comments were among reactions over the spy caper from several in the Seattle business community, which was arguably at the forefront of initiatives in this country to seek close economic ties with Russia as the old Soviet Union began to break apart.

 “The readiness of both sides to make this swap happen quickly is a clear indication that our increased cooperation and newly ‘reset’ relationship is a priority,” said Vipperman. But she conceded that “there are always going to be some people in our society who will point to things like this and use them to suggest Russia hasn’t really changed since the old days.”

The organization Vipperman founded 21 years ago has weatheredan array of political strains over the years as it has pursued its relationship-building programs designed to foster economic ties between the two nations, particularly between the Pacific Northwest and the Russian Far East.

FRAEC was born out of a series of Seattle and Washington State initiatives, leading up to and flowing out of the 1990 Goodwill Games in Seattle, to reach out to what was then the Soviet Union.

In a blog she does for FRAEC, Vipperman wrote: “Although the Russian spy story has made for interesting and tantalizing media coverage, it has unfortunately stirred up old, cold war feelings of mistrust and suspicion. It is well understood by most Americans that all countries have intelligence services active around the world; however, it seems that Russia holds a very special place in people’s minds.”

Bill Robinson, a Seattle attorney with extensive business activity in Moscow, also noted that “this sort of thing has been done by both countries, and many other countries, for years but usually now as industrial espionage.”

“The fact that its resolution was handled so quickly shows that both nations wanted to make it clear it’s time to move on from this sort of thing,” Robinson added.

Douglas Jewett, one-time Seattle City attorney who was in the forefront of developing business opportunities in the Russian Far East, e-mailed me that “people practicing spy craft like this is the 1950’s and 60’s makes no sense to me.”

“What everyone in the business and government world is worried about, and they should be, is the capture of critical computer information through the internet,” said Jewett,

who for the past dozen years has been CEO of Bellevue-based Ramgen Power Systems, Inc.

Noting in her blog that the spy flap “has been a bit frustrating for those of us who work to strengthen our economic and community ties,” Vipperman added “there are far more interesting and compelling stories of how Russians and Americans are working together to improve our communities that do not see the light of day in the media.”

Among the kinds of activities Vipperman is referring to is the relationship between cities in Washington State and the Russian Far East in which the cities, under a program funded by U.S. A.I.D., provide training and resources to officials in the Russian cities.

Leavenworth, the Eastern Washington community in the shadow of the North Cascades that turned its fortunes around years ago by adopting a Bavarian theme, is working with Kamchatka on how to promote tourism, she noted.

Yuri Mamchur, who does a Russia blog for the Seattle think tank, Discovery Institute, did one in the midst of the  spy flap titled “Thanks a lot, Kremlin,” that criticized the spy plan as “not good pr” while poking fun at the whole issue.

“This is all hilarious,” wrote Mamchur, director of Discovery Institute’s Real Russia Project. “I’m loving all the coverage of a bunch of Russians getting paid to befriend Americans. I wish the U.S. had a program like this, I’d totally do this. Can you imagine? I’d get my rent and tuition paid just to blurt out stuff that you can automatically look up, even in more depth, on the Internet.”

Liz Marchi, who guides the Montana Angel Network, hopes to create an awareness on the part of promising entrepreneurs seeking capital that angels are gathering in increasing numbers and quality under the Big Sky.

Marchi, whose primary role is overseeing the Frontier Angel Fund in Kalispell, is helping to launch the third angel-investor group since assuming oversight of the angel network in the state that she adopted sight unseen a decade ago.  She is convinced that nurturing angel-investor support for innovative companies will lure entrepreneurs to create companies in Montana and thus grow the state’s economy.

The July 17 kick-off meeting of the Missoula-based Big Sky Angels group will involve presentations by two companies seeking funds. One is a Ventura, CA, company called Stewart Brown that was incorporated in Montana nine years ago and is now looking to return, which she views as an example of angel support that can lure companies to, or back to, the state.

Montana’s entrepreneur image was dramatically enhanced in May when the U.S. Chamber of Commerce issued a report that ranked the state first in the nation for entrepreneurship and innovation. That’s a ranking that can be misleading, since not all those described as entrepreneurs create businesses that create jobs.

But there’s nothing misleading about the fact the state is home to one of the nation’s most successful entrepreneurs and summer home to the man who may be the nation’s best-known angel investor.

Rob Ryan, who made his fortune taking several companies public, operates Entrepreneur America on his Roaring Ryan Ranch just south of Hamilton. He mentors, one at a time, a handful of the most-promising entrepreneurial companies that seek his help. And Bill Payne, who is one of the investors in Marchi’s fund and summers in Montana, has been described as the closest thing to a national entrepreneur laureate.

Marchi, who had already built a reputation as a successful business-development executive by creating and leading the Kalispell-based Montana West Economic Development organization after arriving here in 2000, decided in 2006 to launch the Frontier Angel Fund.

She admits she didn’t know what the outcome would be when she put together a pooled fund with $50,000 units, but by the end of that year she had almost three dozen members with residents of five states in addition to Montana involved. She raised $1.8 million, about $300,000 more than the working capital she had hoped for.

The Missoula angels’ launch meeting in a few days will also host a visit with Bill Payne, freshly returned from a stint in New Zealand, where he was invited to be entrepreneur in residence at the University of Auckland.

Dr. David Opitz, a homegrown entrepreneur who founded and grew Missoula-based Visual Learning Systems before selling it to Textron, has been tapped to lead the Missoula angel group.

Marchi describes Opitz as “a terrific entrepreneur who understands how to navigate the academic world as well as how to build a successful business. He will be a great collaborator for the new tech transfer efforts in process at the University of Montana.”

Marchi emphasizes that the Missoula group “will need to build its own culture.” But she adds “I think of its future as including angels who may not even live here but are maybe alumni of the University of Montana and very much want their money to be involved in new business endeavors in Missoula.”

That would not be unlike the makeup of her Frontier Angels group, which she says includes “five doctors, a veterinarian, three attorneys and at least four people who were once either CEOs or CFOs of Fortune 500 companies.” Members of the fund hail from California, Georgia, Vermont and Nevada, in addition to Montana.

Montana’s third angel group is the Bozeman-based Bridger Private Capital Network, a group of accredited angel investors formed about the same time as Marchi’s Frontier angel group.  But, unlike Frontier, it doesn’t function as a fund in which members pool their capital. Rather it describes itself as “Montana’s largest angel investor network.”

Marchi has roots in the intermountain area, having grown up on a ranch near Jackson Hole, in Wyoming.  But she traveled far, both in distance and “time,” when she left her job as executive director of communications and public policy for the Winston-Salem, N.C., chamber of commerce and moved with her then-husband and three children to Montana, a place she’d never been before.

“It was like going back in time,” says Marchi. “It was 2000, but it looked like the 1950s. The infrastructure was here but the state was languishing. There wasn’t a bank president who was using e-mail at the time.

“But technology has completely transformed this place,” she enthuses. “And the shared values are incredible. You’d never know if someone had a million dollars in their pickup.

“The quality of people who are doing things here proves that there’s no penalty for being in paradise.”

William D. Ruckelshaus, who has spent most of his life helping create, enforce or promote environmental laws and regulations, says government is obliged to step in on occasion, and probably spend more money, in helping to protect against cataclysmic disasters like the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

Ruckelshaus, twice director of the Environmental Protection Agency, says “society must decide how big the risk of such disasters is and what we need to spend to protect against them. That’s what a regulatory system is about.”

Referring to BP’s preparation for a disaster like the Deepwater Horizon spill, Ruckelshaus said: “There’s no question that risk being weighed by the company was that nothing like this would come along. There’s also no question that if they had anticipated the possibility of anything like this happening, they would have spent a lot more time and money.”

“If they had gone last mile, it would have cost a $1 million a week,” Ruckelshaus estimates. “Think how much they could have saved had they planned for the worst.”

Ruckelshaus, who was chosen in the fall of 1970 by then-President Richard Nixon to be the first EPA administrator, noted in a telephone interview that 40-years-ago appointment had an amusing twist.

Ruckelshaus, now strategic director with Madrona Venture Group in Seattle, recalled with a chuckle that a friend of his had suggested to a Newsweek reporter that Ruckelshaus would be a good selection to head the planned new agency.

“When I read that, I went to (Attorney General) John Mitchell, since I was with the Justice Department at the time, and told him I hadn’t initiated that story,” Ruckelshaus remembered. “I thought that was the end of it. But a little while later, Mitchell called me and asked me if I wanted the job.”

So on December 1, 1970, Ruckelshaus assumed the reins of a new agency that had come into existence as part of an executive order from Nixon. The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAH) was created by that same order.

Ruckelshaus recalled in an Earth Day 40^th anniversary piece in April this year in the Wall Street Journal that he quickly brought enforcement actions against three large cities for violating the Clean Water Act. That was followed by actions against the steel industry and other industrial polluters.

Ruckelshaus explained in the WSJ piece that “I knew that the job of the EPA would be far more contentious in the future if we didn't establish its credibility and its willingness to take forceful—and symbolic—action right from the start. The American people had to know we were serious about meeting their demands.”

Ruckelshaus noted that Nixon signed 16 major pieces of environmental legislation into law during his presidency. To the possible surprise of many, Nixon had initiated most all of them, but Ruckelshaus noted that Nixon’s environmental proposals nonetheless brought him into conflict with a Democrat-controlled Congress.

“Nixon would submit what he thought was good legislation on either clean air or clean water and the Democratic Congress would put in more extreme provisions than Nixon liked,” Ruckelshaus said. “That’s where the political overtones came in because what bothered Nixon was that no matter what he submitted on environmental issues, Congress took it further than he intended. So towards the end, Nixon was quite down on environmental legislation.”

Ruckelshaus returned to head the EPA in 1983 under Ronald Reagan after it became clear the agency’s image needed repair.

In all, Ruckelshaus has spent nearly a half century on behalf of environmental causes, from the time he was a 28-year-old assistant attorney general in Indiana when he obtained court orders against industries polluting the water supply and helped draft the 1961 Indiana Air Pollution Control Act.

Those involvements on behalf of the environment are way too numerous to begin listing, other than to say they continue today with his involvement with the Puget Sound Partnership and its clean-up Puget Sound initiative.

So it’s logical that his input would be of value as the nation grapples with what process to put in place to help reduce future risks of calamities like the BP spill.

“You can never eliminate the risk of these things happening, but there are steps that reasonably should be required to come as close as possible to eliminating them,” he said.

“The problem any society has in avoiding cataclysmic risk is that it is very hard to balance how much money should be spent to minimize the risk,” he said. “If you leave the problem of minimizing the risk just to the company involved, they’ll try to minimize the risk of the cataclysm occurring. So government has to step in on occasion and say we need to spend more to guard against this.”

To Ken Alhadeff, the Seattle businessman who is the financial force behind Memphis, winning the coveted Tony award as Best Musical isn’t the climax of his five-year love affair with this play. It only sets the stage for subsequent acts, including a national tour that will launch in October of 2011 in the musical’s namesake city.

And he suggests that the award and the recognition it brings will also set the stage for the next act for Alhadeff and his wife, Marlene, who he emphasizes is his full partner not only in the development of the Memphis success story but in the opportunities that he knows will now open to them.

In fact, it was Marlene’s acquaintance with the founding partner of Junkyard Dog Productions, Randy Adams, when he was managing director of Palo Alto-based TheaterWorks, that set the stage for Alhadeff’s meeting Adams and his partner, Sue Frost. Alhadeff decided to join them as a partner, which he did in 2006.

He was soon given the script of a show that had been in production since 2003 to which they wanted the rights. Thus the Alhadeffs’ ties to Memphis were born.

“As the plane I was on sat on the tarmac in Seattle, I pulled the script out and read it and before the plane lifted off, my tears were falling on the pages of the script,” Alhadeff said during a telephone interview a couple of days after the gala New York celebration that followed the Tony Awards event.

Those who know Alhadeff know him as an emotional guy who gets as strongly committed to the success of his causes as he does to success in his business ventures.

And after that first reading of the script five years ago, he got emotional about Memphis, which he describes as “a meaningful statement about the power of music to change people and about the state of race relations in America.”

For those who haven’t paid attention, Memphis is the story of a poor white kid who frequented now-famous Beale Street’s black clubs to hear what he described as “the music of my soul.” It’s about his struggle to popularize the music in a white world and his relationship with a black singer. One reviewer described it as “a show of soulful sounds and a parade of engaging characters.”

I told Alhadeff that I had the distinct impression, when we talked in early 2009 for an earlier column as he set about the effort to raise the millions necessary to take the show to Broadway, that he viewed his effort as being as much a commitment to a cause as to a potential investment.

“That’s totally true,” he replied. “We believed strongly that this story needed to be told and realized that musical theater is the ideal vehicle to shed light and joy on a subject.”

Now the story has been told and retold on the Sam Shubert Theater stage to enthusiastic audiences. And the wildest-dreams kind of reward has come for the Alhadeffs and others who made the commitment to the cause.

“The production company will continue on,” he said. “Clearly, being Tony-award-winning producers will open almost any door for us to evaluate scripts.

“Because we have produced at the highest levels, along with our partners, it validates our credentials and thus opens doors,” he added.

And financial rewards will begin coming in from those who invested in the Memphis dream, even though he was clear from the outset of his raising capital for the musical that  “the core of the investment in this show has to be based on the passion that comes with seeing it.”

Alhadeff, at age 61, has made numerous successful investments during his business career. But he says this was the first time he had to ask other people to invest substantial amounts of money in his vision.

Part of the vision going forward is for growing theatrical success for his hometown, where Memphis had a two-week run in early 2009 at the 5^th Avenue Theater before its move to Broadway.

That last pre-Broadway stop marked a milestone both for the Alhadeffs and the 5^th Avenue, since it had been 30 years since his late father and a partner had undertaken the restoration and reopening of the landmark theater, which occurred in 1980. Alhadeff went on the 5^th Avenue board in 1994, after his father’s death, and subsequently served as chair of that board.

“Seattle has been on the rise for a long time as one of the premier theater cities in America,” Alhadeff said. “We are going to continue to see major productions developed in Seattle on the way to Broadway.”

And it’s clear that he and Marleen plan to bring their new national theater credentials to boost Seattle’s future opportunities.

Cary Bozeman, who was mayor of two Washington State cities and is now CEO of the Port of Bremerton, senses that revenue-starved local governments might be ready to sacrifice sacred silos to ease their financial strain by creating new public-public partnerships.

Bozeman is thinking specifically about an alliance between Washington’s cities and port districts, something he says might benefit taxpayers as well as the public entities that are facing shrinking resources.

So he wants to put together a statewide conference, either late this fall or early next year, that would draw representatives of the state’s 250 cities and 72 port districts to explore how such collaborations might be brought about.

“The old system of providing services isn’t going to work any longer in a financial environment in which public resources will continue to be challenged,” said Bozeman, who was elected mayor of Bellevue three times and of Bremerton twice.

“We’ve entered a time when political silos can’t work,” Bozeman said. “I think a good start to dealing with a new era for local government would be for cities and ports to explore how we can share things like economic development, tourism and recreational programs.”

Former Seattle mayor Greg Nickels and former Spokane mayor John Powers, as well as former Port of Seattle CEO Mic Dinsmore, think Bozeman’s proposal is an idea whose time has come.

 “I concur with his view that there are significant possible benefits to breaking down the political walls to advance the opportunity for a public-public partnership between cities and ports,” said Powers, who also served as CEO of economic-development focused Enterprise Seattle and headed Collier’s International’s Washington State operations.

“The upsides of the idea of cities-ports collaboration are many,” Dinsmore said. “For one thing, projects get built faster and at lower cost to the taxpayers. Joint marketing is more effective as well.”

Nickels, Seattle’s two-term mayor who was defeated last year in a bid for a third term, thinks that port powers relating to economic development should be the key focus of any more formal collaboration “because those are powers that cities don’t have.”

But he also raised what would be a hot political issue in any such silo-busting talks when he suggested “it would also be worth looking at the silos between ports,” noting that the ports of Seattle and Tacoma would together be the second largest port on the West Coast. But instead they’re constantly competing with each other.”

Bozeman was first elected to the Bellevue city council in 1976 at the age of 36 and subsequently was elected three times as mayor of the state’s fourth largest city, simultaneously serving over much of that time as the head of the King County Boys and Girls Club.

He moved to Bremerton in 1996 to run the Olympic College Foundation and six years later ran for mayor of that city, both because he saw the potential to revitalize the decaying downtown area and because of “a love for local government, where you can make things happen.”

Bozeman first proposed the city-ports cooperation idea in a speech in Spokane about a month ago and says the reaction since then has been positive. So now he’s putting together the steering committee he hopes will take the lead on a conference.

 “Port districts in Washington State have some interesting legal powers, which is why so many port districts have been created in Washington State,” he said. That’s why they’ve been formed across the state, even in places far from any body of water larger than a lake.

“Ports can build sports facilities, provide recreational opportunities for people like parks and marinas and collaborate on economic development and job creation.”

Pointing to the budget-driven decision by some cities to close a majority of their parks, Bozeman said “ports could absolutely have an impact on those sorts of spending challenges. Ports have the authority to generate the resources to support park systems as one example of what they could bring to a partnership.”

Bozeman suggested “the future of government providing necessary services and doing economic development is going to be about devising ways to cooperate with other government agencies, non-profits and the private sector. The silos in which we’ve worked all these years simply must be broken down.”

“Over time it’s not just developing public-public relationships that will be important,” offered Powers, the Spokane mayor turned economic development director turned private sector business leader. “It ultimately will be about a triadic relationship that invites and balances participation from private enterprise, public entities and civic organizations to address big regional issues, as some are suggesting for national and global issues.”

Helen Thomas, who as a White House correspondent has been peppering presidents with prickly questions since before the current occupant of the White House was born, deserves a better career climax than the sudden end that occurred for her this week.

The 89-year-old Thomas, role model for decades of women journalists and admired by many for her willingness to confront the powerful, resigned in the wake of an unacceptable comment about Jews needing to “get the hell out of Palestine.”

It’s doubtful if anyone with a television or a computer could have missed the avalanche of comments that has dominated websites and blogs since the video interview with her by a rabbi with a website called rabbilive.com surfaced last weekend.

No one could or would defend the unacceptable comment she made to the rabbi after he spotted her at a Jewish Heritage Day event at the White House late last month and came up with a microphone to get her to make a comment about Israel.

Some bloggers have suggested the rabbi bushwhacked her. And he likely got the kind of comment he was after when he spotted her in the crowd and came up to interview her. But he didn’t put the words in her mouth.

The interview became viral in 24 hours after it surfaced last weekend, the video taking over the Internet and the torrent of comments it unleashed dominating blogs and newspaper columns. The interview came before, but began gaining traction after, the death of nine activists as Israeli commandos boarded a Turkish aid ship bound for Gaza.

But amidst what one well-regarded political blogger named Robert Scheer characterized as a “media tirade” against her that he described “as illogical as it is hysterical” has come the suggestion that the body of work and accomplishments of 60 years shouldn’t be washed away with a single unacceptable comment.

“The few sentences uttered by her were, as she quickly acknowledged, wrong, deeply so I would add,” Scheer wrote in his truthdig blog. “But they cannot justify the road-rage destruction of the dean of the Washington press corps. Suddenly this heroic woman who broke so many gender barriers and dared to challenge presidential arrogance was reduced to nothing more than the stereo-typical anti-Israel Arab that is so fashionable to hate.”

It was a little more than a year ago that Thomas was honored at Washington State University as she and senior CBS White House correspondent Robert Schieffer received lifetime achievement awards at the 35^th annual Edward R. Murrow Symposium.

Because she and I once worked for the same wire service, she a major figure covering presidents for United Press International while I operated down in the relative anonymity of covering governors and legislatures, I got to spend a couple of days with her in Pullman, basically carrying luggage for an old lady.

And in numerous conversations with her during those few days in Pullman, what emerged was the sense of a person irate at the use of military force, whether by the U.S. or Israel. The former was evidenced by her sharp questions of then-President George Bush over the Iraq war in particular and the latter by questions about the U.S. role in the Middle East that made her hated by Israeli lobbying groups in Washington, D.C.

Thomas, a Lebanese-American who grew up in Detroit and joined UPI in 1943, moving to the White House beat during Dwight Eisenhower’s last year as president, is widely known as a critic of Israel. But our conversations made it clear she’s a harsh critic of the Israeli government and what she views as its militarism, not of the citizens of that nation.

Many viewed her penetrating and critical questions posed to Bush, particularly about the war in Iraq, during news conferences as proof that she was liberal. It was a sense that created a virtual hatred of her among Bush Administration officials and GOP leaders.

Thus when President Obama called on her at his first news conference last year, he smiled expectantly, apparently thinking he’d get a softball question. Instead she weighed in with a zinger and a hard-nosed follow-up question that brought a furrow to Obama’s brow.

After her ill-considered comments raised the fire storm, she was forced to resign from Hearst, the company that she’d worked for as a columnist since leaving the then-dead wire service in 1980, and issued an apology.

The head of the Anti-Defamation League said the apology wasn’t acceptable. Refusal to accept an apology is a somewhat untenable position since when the Israeli government apologized after 23-year-old Olympia activist Rachel Corrie was crushed by an Israeli army bulldozer on the Gaza strip as she sought to keep Palestinian homes from being bulldozed, it was accepted.

And just today, the Israeli government apologized for sending the press a link to an online video parodying last week’s deadly commando raid on the flotilla of pro-Gaza activists, an apology they hope will suffice. So someone with more savvy is likely to advise the executive of the Anti-Defamation League to be quiet.

Thomas turns 90 in August. And hopefully some group, ideally a women’s organization, will have the courage to say the litany of firsts in her resume and the barriers she broke on behalf of women deserve recognition. So does the courage she evidenced as a front-row journalist to ask the questions no one else wanted to ask to help keep 11 presidents on an honest track.

It’s a recognition that would be more than appropriate as an honor for her contributions, rather than having the memory of those contributions ravaged by reaction to a single mistake. Hopefully some organization will have the courage to do her that service and be willing to put down anyone who would be so small as to think she should be denied that.

A former female colleague at UPI was quoted as saying she hoped the end of Thomas’ career “does not taint a long and important legacy.” It’s important that some group picks up Thomas’ banner to ensure the legacy is recognized.

Microsoft, once the “Beast From Redmond” that loomed over any venture-capital deal discussion in Silicon Valley, “isn’t even a part of the conversation these days,” says Jon Staenberg, onetime Microsoftie and a venture capitalist with involvement in both Seattle and Bay Area venture communities.

The Seattle entrepreneurial and investment communities need to think about that as they discuss the state of innovation in the Puget Sound region, suggests Staenberg, whose involvement in both region’s venture activity extends back well over a decade. “Otherwise, we might be in trouble in the future.”

Ironically, Staenberg’s comments came in an interview about a week before a Kauffman Foundation report on entrepreneurism that ranked Seattle last in entrepreneurial activity among 15 metropolitan areas and launched a round of hand-wringing and defensive conversation in the local entrepreneurial and venture communities.

“The Bay Area has recognized, though it’s a process still in progress, that there needs to be change and transformation, to reconsider what it takes to be a successful venture community,” says Staenberg, a partner in California-based Rustic Canyon Partners and has his own Seattle-based Staenberg Venture Partners. He’s viewed as one of the more experienced venture capitalists in the Northwest.

“The Bay Area is undergoing that necessary transformation and as that happens, Seattle is less a part of discussions there,” he adds.

With respect to his comments about Microsoft, Staenberg recalled a recent presentation in the Bay Area on behalf of a company that focused on an application of Microsoft Sharepoint, the content-management system with integrated search functionality that’s being touted by Microsoft.

“Before we could begin to explain the investment-value of the company, we had to first educate every v.c. there about Sharepoint. It was an example of the fact Microsoft just isn’t part of conversations there now,” he said.

“The reason Microsoft isn’t part of discussions in Silicon Valley anymore is the same reason that IBM isn’t part of the discussions,” Staenberg said. “Enterprise software isn’t what entrepreneurs are doing. Google is the new Microsoft.

“Cloud computing has allowed start-ups to create innovative products very inexpensively and with incredible efficiency,” he added.

Staenberg summarizes the difference between Silicon Valley and Seattle as the difference between “maniacal entrepreneurism” and a focus on lifestyle.

‘It’s simply in the blood there,” he says. “When I go there I find as many as half a dozen networking events I could go to every single night.”

“The unfortunate thing,” he says, “is that we’re a natural second market for Bay Area venture folks. Seattle should be a major part of the Silicon Valley ecosystem because there’s such a natural affiliation. We have good v.c.’s here but there just aren’t very many of them.”

Staenberg is also complimentary about the manner in which those who have had financial success in their ventures in the Seattle area are seeking to put back into entrepreneurial undertakings.

“Some of the best investing work being done locally is being done by angels, many of whom are alums of Microsoft, Amazon and Avenue A,” he says, adding “this is a critical part of the venture eco-system and it gives me hope that we can ride out this storm and be a relevant and strong start-up community.”

And he also hopes for greater focus on cooperation between the markets as a key to staying entrepreneurially competitive.

“I have always felt that bridging the two communities, taking the strengths of each, would create a sum greater than the parts,” Staenberg said.

Herb Bridge, who fought in two wars and had a part in setting the stage for the first Gulf War before retiring as the nation’s highest-ranking reserve admiral, thinks nine Memorial Days of U.S. at war in Afghanistan is enough.

Bridge, longtime Seattle business leader as CEO then chairman of the Ben Bridge Jeweler, the West Coast chain of jewelry stores, says “we need to get the heck out of countries that don’t want us and have no significance to our survival, or indeed no impact on the world as a whole.”

I asked Bridge for his thoughts as the U.S. death toll in Afghanistan reached the 1,000 milestone last week and we prepare for Memorial Day next Monday to remember, or are at least we’re supposed to remember, those who died in service to the nation, nine Memorial Days on since the U.S. launched war there.

It took seven years to reach 500 deaths in Afghanistan, but the spike in military action there has taken the second 500 in less than two years. That doesn’t count the thousands more who have had their lives shattered by physical or psychological wounds, or both.

The conversation with Bridge was also prompted by a series of exchanges on an e-mail train on which one-time colleagues in the former global wire service United Press International gather to share thoughts. Soldiers’ deaths and Memorial Day occupied e-mails on the train a couple of days ago.

Gary Haynes, a retired photographer who spent much of his career with UPI, offered this: “Both Iraq and Afghanistan have become, for Americans with no kids in the fight, some sort of abstraction.

“We have no draft. There is no ‘war tax’ to remind us of the cost associated with two wars,” he said. “Reinstate the draft, and the war would be wound down quickly. Make sure to include all the draft-age kids of our Senators and Congressmen, and the war would get top level attention.”

When I sent that to Bridge, he e-mailed back: “In my Navy Times, received today, are the pictures labeled the Human Toll, close to 500 of the men and women (491 to be exact) who have lost their lives (in the past two years) of the damned war that seems to have no conclusion in sight.”

“Yes, maybe if (members of Congress) had a personal stake, like their offspring being over there, they might come up with innovative and constructive means of getting the heck out,” he said.

Bridge, a vibrant and active octogenarian, known for his love of motorcycling and outings with the group of CEO cyclists known as Hell’s Rotarians, wears his Democratic party loyalty as visibly as his military honors but is unhesitatingly critical of continued Afghan involvement.

Susan B. DeLong, A retired UPIer now living with her husband in Australia, recalled visiting Normandy and the cemetery of another war.

“My walk through the cemetery was one of the most humbling experiences of my

life.,” she e-mailed. “As I walked past the gravestones, I noticed the ages, row after row of 18-19-20-year-olds. I started to tear-up and noticed I was not alone.”

When I shared that with Bridge, he offered his thought that the death of each young man in earlier wars left grieving families “but generally didn’t leave dependents. Now, with many of those killed being older, they leave not merely the pain of loss but families bereft of their sole support.”

Recalling his own military career, Bridge said he enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1942 at the age of 17, was selected off his ship to go to officer candidate school and returned as an officer before the war ended.

Married and with a baby, he was called up at the outbreak of the Korean War and served as a carrier officer for the duration.

His final command was in 1982 when he was asked as a reserve admiral to take over active command of a fleet of 45 logistics ships for a few months while the eventual commander underwent final preparation back in the states.

It was during that command that he helped set the stage for U.S. response in the first Gulf War by landing 1,000 marines quickly in a maneuver that he said eased Saudi and Arab concerns about the U.S. ability to muster rapid response in any war with Iraq, “which was exactly how it was done when Kuwait was invaded.”

Contrasting his thoughts about continuing the Iraq involvement with his convictions about getting out of Afghanistan, Bridge said “I just feel the Iraqis have a nation. We took it apart when we launched that war and we have an obligation to finish the role of rebuilding it.”

With regard to Afghanistan, Bridge said: “There’s not really a nation there. We need to let them go fight among themselves and leave them alone.”

As Bridge talked about Afghanistan, I was reminded of a quote about the place from another former UPI colleague, one-time Vietnam correspondent Ray Herndon, that I included in another column last fall, a quote that bears inclusion here.

Herndon observed for that column, which was aimed at drawing parallels between Vietnam and Afghanistan: “It was the first and only country that Alexander the Great couldn't conquer. And Imperial Britain, which easily gobbled up the combined territory of India and Pakistan next door, somehow couldn't defeat the much smaller Afghanistan. And it wasn't for lack of trying.”

He recalled the then-Soviet Union’s failed 10-year effort to occupy Afghanistan and added: “Why do we think that we can wage a successful counterinsurgency in Afghanistan using only one-tenth the number of troops we committed to Vietnam? Are we kidding ourselves?”