• Children's Alliance wants to legalize pot—for the kids' sake! The Seattle-based lobbying organization announced last week that it is endorsing Initiative 502, the fall measure to legalize marijuana, because pot laws (not to mention pot arrests) "have caused children to be separated from their parents."
• On September 17, the Granada Apartments on Capitol Hill received a surprising upgrade: a dead bolt locking the door of its courtyard. The dead bolt appeared days before building tenants were scheduled to host a September 22 pro-gay-marriage fundraiser in the courtyard. It's significant because in August, Breier-Scheetz Properties—which owns the Granada, among other Capitol Hill buildings—donated $20,000 to defeating gay marriage in Washington after failing to stop another pro-gay-marriage fundraiser from taking place in the Granada courtyard. No one at the property company was available for comment. Granada tenants, meanwhile, are now frantically trying to secure a street-use permit in order to hold their pro-gay-marriage fundraiser in front of the Granada Apartments instead of in its freshly locked courtyard.
• On September 17, the Washington State auditor reported that the Seattle School District misspent or overpaid roughly $1.3 million "due to a lack of adequate internal controls and supporting documentation" from 2005 to 2009. That's on top of $1.8 million in questionable spending by the district in the same time frame that was discovered last year. "This is very serious," says Mindy Chambers, a spokeswoman for the state auditor's office. Who should take the blame? School board president Michael DeBell wasn't personally responsible, but the buck should stop with him. DeBell was overseeing district spending during the critical years: He was chair of the district's Audit & Finance Committee in 2006–'07, a member of the district's Operations Committee from 2006–'08, and the board's appointee to the committee that examines capital investments. It appears DeBell could have caught the spending, but he was asleep at the wheel. DeBell did not respond to requests for comment.
• Mayor Mike McGinn's 2013–2014 budget proposal includes funds to hire 10 new police officers. If the proposal is enacted by the city council, it would mark the first time in three years that the city has had a net gain in new officers.
• McGinn's budget also calls for the city to invest in 52 gunshot locater systems—which can pinpoint a location to within a 50-foot radius—to help police track where gunshots are fired within the city.
• At the Bill Clinton fundraiser for Jay Inslee on September 15, as part of a video interlude designed to remind people how scary Rob McKenna is, Inslee's people showed the crowd several headlines ripped from Slog, The Stranger's blog. But one of those headlines was incorrectly rendered. The Inslee campaign had it as "Rob McKenna Still Doesn't Give a $@&# About Women's Health." The actual headline, written by Cienna Madrid on January 30, is "Rob McKenna Still Doesn't Give a Shit About Women's Health." 
