Good morning! The Fourth of July weekend is over, which means we have at least two more weeks of hearing surprise fireworks at 1 a.m. After some perfect, mild weather this weekend, we’re spiking into the 80s just for today. It’s a good day to remember that we’re surrounded by water on three sides. Get in it, on it, or around it.
Let’s do the news.
It’s Seattle’s Last World Cup Game: And USMNT is back. The US team is playing Belgium in the knockout Round of 16, and according to the New York Times, the odds in this game are a coin flip. The game starts at Lumen “Seattle” Stadium at 5 p.m. If you don’t have tickets to the game, you can wander into literally any sports bar in the city, but we have some favorites. Or, do what I do at home and watch La Copa Mundial on Peacock, live in Spanish. The announcers are more fun anyway.
Trump isn’t coming to Seattle today, but his sticky little fingers are still on this match. In Wednesday’s game against Bosnia and Herzegovina, top-scorer Folarin Balogun got a controversial red card that would ban him from today’s game. “By Wednesday night, the White House had committed itself to taking action over Balogun’s red card,” Politico reports. “That kicked off four days of coordinated lobbying, legal maneuvering and diplomacy that stretched from the Oval Office to FIFA’s headquarters in Zurich.” Yesterday, FIFA announced that they were suspending Balogun’s suspension, and he’d be able to play today. Was this inappropriate political meddling in the Beautiful Game? FIFA insists it’s not, but Belgium is trying a last-minute appeal.
If the US team wins this game, it’ll be only the second time they’ve made it to the quarterfinals. The last time was in 2002, when the tournament was in Japan and South Korea. (Technically they made it to the semifinals in 1930, but the format of the tournament was totally different.)
America Turned 250: And her party came with a massive heatwave, lightning, and a two-hour evacuation in DC due to severe weather. Despite the chaos, Trump insisted on going through with his speech, hours late. The New York Times called it a display of nationalism, not patriotism, to which the White House responded: “The celebration of America’s 250th anniversary is going to display great patriotism in our nation’s capital and throughout the country, and the president is proud to participate in our historic semiquincentennial celebration. Only people who suffer from a severe case of Trump derangement syndrome would find a problem with that.”
Also, there was that moment when a skydiver’s giant American flag got snagged in a tree (he’s okay):
Smithsonian So Woke: On the Fourth of July, the White House also found the time to release a scathing 162-page report titled “Saving America’s Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage.” The White House Domestic Policy Council accuses the museum of anti-white bias and “extreme political activism that seeks to transform our country.” Historians have obviously called bullshit on the report, but it does conclude that “the president has a duty and obligation to seek reforms of the Smithsonian.” It does not elaborate.
Oh Good: The Trump administration rolled back three dozen firearm regulations, ditching Biden’s crackdown on illegal sales, restoring gun rights to some people with mental illness, and reopening the loopholes for private weapon sales.
Millionaires Tax Gets on the Ballot: Brian Heywood and his merry band of millionaires collected more than 500,000 signatures, so their repeal of Washington’s Millionaires Tax will be on November’s ballot. Don’t fall for it. We need revenue. We need an income tax. And we need Brian Heywood to leave Washington State.
More Layoffs: Microsoft is laying off almost 5,000 people, including 600 here in Washington. According to the Seattle Times, the employees won’t be replaced by AI, but they are losing their jobs because of it (AI is “radically shifting the roles within the company,” they said). Microsoft still employs 52,000 people in Washington.
Bob Ferguson Gets a Raise: And so does every other Washington elected official. Thanks to the Washington Citizens’ Commission on Salaries for Elected Officials, members of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches got an across-the-board cost-of-living adjustment, plus some bonuses for roles that were chronically underpaid (like our state legislature). With the new increases, lawmakers now earn $72,494, roughly $10,000 more than two years ago. Meanwhile, Governor Ferguson now makes $234,275 a year, about $30k more than when he was sworn in.
I’ll leave you with my favorite thing I read this morning: “A long time ago on a lush tropical island, a population of ‘hobbits’ ventured into a cave to scavenge the kills of dragons. This is not a Tolkien tale—it’s the upshot of a new study about the short-statured human relative Homo floresiensis, which lived for more than a million years on the Indonesian island of Flores alongside Komodo dragons.” These little hobbits disappeared around the time that modern humans came onto the scene, and I love them.
