The Right to Strip

Seattle Citizens for Free Speech, the pro-strip-club campaign, spent nearly $139,000 producing and airing two ads against Referendum 1, the ballot measure that would uphold the restrictive strip-club regulations passed by the city council earlier this year. The first ad makes the case that strip clubs are already strictly regulated; the second compares the regulations to Prohibition-era restrictions on alcohol. So far, the group has raised $822,000, the vast majority of it from Seattle's two largest strip clubs.

Elsewhere on the ballot, the campaign for Mayor Greg Nickels's "Bridging the Gap" road-maintenance package has raised $40,000 from just four donors (including PEMCO Insurance and Vulcan, Inc.). City Council Member Sally Clark, meanwhile, has raised more than $100,000, despite having not a single credible challenger (her only opponent, Stan Lippman, runs for something every year). ERICA C. BARNETT

The Right to Strike

Unionized employees at KING 5 are asking TV viewers to change the channel during this year's November sweeps. In a letter sent out late last week (on KING 5 stationery), KING 5's International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) write:

"They [KING 5] are currently trying to eliminate an entire segment of IBEW workers from their jobs by not bargaining in good faith. The company and News Director Pat Costello have made it clear they want these union workers out and then have other people double up on their current work responsibilities.... We are feeling the only way to get this Texas company [Belo Corporation] to negotiate like civil Washingtonians, not cowboys, is to boycott KING 5's news during the upcoming November sweeps."

("Sweeps" is the time when ad rates are established for TV stations by surveying how many people are watching each channel.)

Asked to comment on his employees' call for the mass tune-out, News Director Costello said, "We're going to negotiate at the table, not in public." NANCY DREW

The Right to Housing

After discovering last week that the budget for its federally funded housing-counseling service will be slashed by $80,000 (25 percent), due to nationwide budget cuts in the federal Department of Housing, the Fremont Public Association (FPA) is scrambling to find another funding source. "It has nothing to do with the quality of the service and nothing to do with the devastating need," says Paul Haas, development director for the FPA. In the past three years, the number of people helped by FPA's region-wide housing-counseling service has increased 400 percent as residents from as far away as Bellingham received information about predatory lenders, tenants' rights, and crises like eviction. The FPA is pressuring the city to cough up the difference when the council determines the budget later this year. Otherwise, the FPA will have to cut two counselors, which could mean turning away several hundred people each year. SARAH MIRK

The Right to Privacy

Alberto Fontana, who lives in the downtown subsidized-housing project Security House, has filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) alleging discrimination by his building's manager. Fontana, 44, has an emotional disorder and claims in his complaint that the manager required him to provide confidential information about his medications on an emergency-contact form. After receiving the complaint, the nonprofit Housing Resources Group (HRG), which owns the building, dropped the emergency-contact form for a new one that does not request confidential medical information and shredded all the old forms. Ironically, that remedy only fueled Fontana's suspicions.

HRG director Sarah Lewontin says, "When it was brought to our attention that the information we had asked for is not in compliance with the current law, we immediately made the change." In June, Fontana requested a $50,000 settlement to drop the discrimination claims. SARAH MIRK

The Right to Stand Up and Be Counted

Last June, a 28-year-old political operative named Benjamin Lawver (who spent several years working for the Senate Democratic Campaign Committee and, in his free time, registered young voters at punk shows) won a $250,000 "Homegrown Political Innovation" grant, funded by California-based Skyline Public Works, to help him mobilize young people. Lawver's new group, The Organization (he'd been using the name as a placeholder as he was writing up the application, and it stuck), has hired one staffer and set up shop in a Broadway office on Capitol Hill. The Organization is currently organizing twentysomethings to volunteer for three Democratic challengers in state house races and hopes to blossom into a force for 2008. "A lot of people in my generation are disenfranchised," Lawver says. "Our mission is to make them realize they can have an impact." JOSH FEIT