Seattle’s rich people fucked themselves over for decades, and now you have to pay for it: With city funding, a number of Seattle’s wealthier white communities buried their power lines under the sidewalk decades ago so they could look more like the suburbs. They did a bad job of it, and now the power cables break so often that Seattle is becoming known for bad power outages, and taxpayers are on the hook to dig everything up and fix it, the Seattle Times reports.
Tacoma legislative candidate charged with DUI after, you guessed it: As Washington Democrats take a greater and greater share of seats from the state’s collapsing Republican Party, they also absorb a greater share of the political class’ DUIs. Krista Perez announced her candidacy for the House Drunk Driver’s Caucus last week after, authorities say, the progressive challenger crashed her pickup truck, admitted she had been drinking, and refused a breathalyzer test. She’s running to unseat incumbent Rep. Melanie Morgan, a fellow Democrat, from her Tacoma seat in the 29th District, the Tacoma News Tribune reports.
But wait, there’s more: I laugh every time I see the photograph Jerry Cornfield of the Washington State Standard took of Kitsap-area House Rep. Tarra Simmons back in June as the Democrat was being grilled on corruption charges. She was fined $15,000 last week for steering a government contract to a friend and retaliating against a whistleblower. Simmons is notable for being the first state legislator with prior felony convictions (not misdemeanors; that’s a highly competitive bracket), but her criminal background shouldn’t be blamed for her recent behavior; that’s not fair to formerly incarcerated people. The shady characters she chooses to surround herself with now, Washington’s political class, are to blame.
They finally dynamited the stupid fucking old building in Portland blocking Amtrak to Seattle:
A rare victory for abortion rights in Idaho: A federal judge there ruled Idaho cannot criminalize abortions performed to protect the health of a mother. The state previously decreed such women had to die after a trigger law rolled back abortion rights in the aftermath of the US Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. Idaho Republicans might have a deathgrip on state politics, but abortion rights are still very popular there, and voters will decide in November via a ballot initiative whether to restore them.
Political pollsters faked results for “social experiment”: We’re pretty sure Idahoans will restore abortion rights because that’s what the polls tell us, so hopefully those polls are not lying to us as part of a research project. That’s exactly what happened recently in two high-profile elections, where fake pollsters Median Strategies released bogus results, including one putting Democratic socialist Francesca Hong 20 points above her opponent in the Wisconsin gubernatorial race only for her to then lose.
“Median Strategies was created as a short term social experiment to examine how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification. We are not seeking publicity or attribution for the individuals involved and are declining interviews,” the company told the LA Times.
Elderly Democrats are being ripped off by spam PACs forwarding little money to candidates: That’s the verdict On Data and Democracy reported after pouring through 300 million donations logged through the FEC.
“Republicans went all-in on these tactics first and offer a cautionary tale. After flooding supporters’ phones with fundraising spam in recent election cycles, their grassroots donor base—the party supporters who occasionally give when something moves them, until the spam drives them off—has been hollowed out. Republicans raised less from small- and mid-sized donors in 2024, a presidential year, than in the 2022 midterms.”
Luckily for us, alchemy is real: They called me a fool. A madman. But I showed them. I showed all of them. The eggheads at the Large Hadron Collider have finally discovered something worthwhile: lead can be turned into gold (they’re only three protons different anyways) through a complex scientific process, which we can save some time on by just calling alchemy*.
So sell your gold now, and invest in oil, it’s spiking again: Reuters reports a key diesel metric hit an all-time high of $102.20 on Monday as the summer harvest meets the reality of blockades of Persian Gulf oil and a Russian export ban in response to Ukrainian refinery attacks. What does this mean for you? Food is going to become even more expensive (again).
Judge says Trump can deport thousands of Ethiopians: Like thousands of Haitians and Syrians, the US Department of Homeland Security is terminating the Temporary Protected Status for thousands of Ethiopians. TPS exists to cover refugees from countries where something terrible happens, like a civil war in Africa’s second-most populous country, letting them work and protecting them from deportation. Reuters reports the plaintiffs argue Ethiopia is still too dangerous for many refugees to return to and that the Trump administration is specifically targeting non-whites for deportation.
An update on actually existing campus antisemitism:
The University of Alberta has been plagued with the stigma of Nazi collaborators for years. Of the thousands who fled to the province after World War II, a number became prominent academic administrators and founded a Holocaust revisionist thinktank there. For a time, even the university chancellor, Peter Savaryn, was a veteran of Hitler’s Waffen-SS praetorian guard. After one such Nazi (Yaroslav Hunka) was given a standing ovation in the Canadian Parliament as a WWII veteran (before it was reported which side he fought for), the university has been trying to get rid of the research trust established in his name. They got approval to do so earlier this month (the Hunka family is “disappointed,” their lawyer Julian Savaryn told the Ottawa Citizen) but simultaneously announced they would keep endowments from other Waffen-SS soldiers totaling over $1 million. Researchers with the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center, named after the famed Nazi hunter from the same Ukrainian community as many of these collaborators, say the university is undercounting both Nazis and dollars, with the endowments worth $2.2 million.
*Editor’s note: I am retiring from journalism to open the world’s first CASH FOR LEAD business.
