The point of this section -- Qnotes -- is to have a place for the site's "webwrangler" to put down occasional notes that have little to do with the primary aim of this site: Gay news, especially gay news concerning Seattle. I've been calling the site a "preview" for over a month because the work of getting the backend plumbing of the site ready for it to fulfill that intent has been what's mostly concerned me.

But I thought it would be useful -- as a kind of future yardstick -- to post a bit more here about what I hope this site will become. I do that by posting a response I sent to someone who had encouraged me to write more about the Seattle City Council race between Tim Burgess and David Della.

All I've done is post digests of a couple of Times stories here, here, and here.

Someone who had known Burgess as spokesmodel for the very anti-gay Concerned Women of America urged me to join SGN's campaign against Burgess. I explained why I wouldn't be doing that:

I understand [why you'd be opposed to Burgess], and I'm sure I'd feel the same way if I had known him as the CWA spokesperson. I certainly can't tell if Burgess is being disingenuous about his newfound tolerance or if he really has discovered a new way of looking at things. I don't know if he was, in fact, as uncomfortable as he now says he was about working with the truly dreadful CWA. It helps, however, that his business partner -- who did and does support CWA -- confirms his account of the intra-agency policies on that score.

But then there's Della. And I just don't want to see him get another four years on the council. I don't want to listen to him on the SeattleChannel talk about how he wants to put bandages on the viaduct so that it will hold up for another few years until we can build something bigger and uglier to replace it. And those are the sorts of issues the council mostly deals with. And I don't like the way Della deals with them. And, frankly, I don't care that Paul Allen's company might have gotten a sweetheart deal on the South Lake Union Streetcar. I'm delighted it's there. I wish Allen had been made to pay a bigger part of it, but getting those rails into the street was a great accomplishment in a city that doesn't have many transportation accomplishments.

Now, I just want to see more of those rails -- especially including the promised (but now unlikely) First Hill Streetcar that was supposed to make up for the canceled First Hill light rail station.

Della is a roadblock to any of that happening. (Fortunately, though, he seems to be an ineffective roadblock who hasn't managed to gain any traction in four years to influence the consensus ways of the council.) I won't vote for him. (I might leave the race blank.) But I'm not ready to advise anyone else on how they should vote in the race.

If I'd had time before the election to actually focus on writing the blog instead of writing the code to make the blog work, I would probably have tried to deal with the whole thing as a flat news story -- not as an endorsement of either. Not telling people what to think, but helping them figure out what to think about.

It is, for one thing, an interesting media story that SGN -- which has never done this sort of thing -- dived so deeply into one race, and that they ran their Della endorsement before running the stories that made it clear that what they were really doing is an anti-endorsement of Burgess.

An important part of that story would have been: How often does the council deal with issues that have a direct impact on LGBT issues in anything more substantive than one of their occasional resolutions? I don't know the answer to that. I'm not even sure how Della would have voted last term if faced with one of those issues. (I'm pretty sure I know how he'd vote if he gets back on.)

It would have been a good story to talk to Podlodowski about why she supports him. She understands the council, its personalities, and the issues it faces. And she's comfortable giving a prominent endorsement to him. A good L&G news source in Seattle should be willing to explain why that's happening. I just wish I'd had time to do it.

I hope to be able to get to the point of doing those sorts of things in Qblog, but I also need to get the platform ready for it. It's the second aspect I've been dealing with.