SCOTUS Rulings are All Over the Map: The court upheld birthright citizenship, which is good, because white supremacists were trying to overturn the precedent to purge the country of millions of people and disenfranchise voters. The vote was 5-4, though, which is too close for comfort. The justices also greenlit the president to fire the heads of independent federal agencies without cause, which is bad, and unanimously upheld laws in Idaho and West Virginia banning transgender athletes from women’s and girls’ sports, which is horrific. It’s likely the other 25 states with similar laws will interpret the decision as giving the go-ahead for their laws.
Suspect in Juniper Blessing Killing Not Competent to Stand Trial: Christopher Leahy isn’t mentally stable enough to be prosecuted yet according to medical findings adopted by a King County Superior Court judge on Monday. He’s being sent for treatment at Western State Hospital, after which he is expected to enter a plea.
McClatchy Reporters Across Pacific Northwest Win New Contract After Strike: It took over a year of negotiating, but union newspaper workers at the McClatchy-owned Tacoma News Tribune, the Olympian, Bellingham, the Tri-City Herald, andthe Idaho Statesman in Boise finally have a new three-year contract according to a press release from the Pacific Northwest NewsGuild (which also represents Stranger staff). The workers struck the papers earlier this month after they said management wouldn’t come to the table to negotiate serious concerns about pay and AI settled by the new contract. The Stranger wrote about those concerns back in April.
Non-profit News is Big Business: Whether they’re local oligarchs or multinational hedge funds, newspaper owners love to plead poverty when explaining why they’ve cut the industry to ribbons. Never a sector to let a good crisis go to waste, over the last 20 years, non-profits stepped in to fill the funding gap in some communities, and has grown non-profit news from a rescue mission into a bonafide industry of its own. A new piece in Amphibian, “When saving journalism pays better than doing journalism” breaks down the numbers of how many pricey executives these NGOs retain compared to actual reporters (tooth-to-tail ratio) so donors can see what their money is actually going toward.
After Mass Layoffs, Bungie Whistleblower Says Leadership Wasted Profits on Unneeded Office: There are plenty of game developers in Greater Seattle, but for 25 years Bungie was one of the most successful, eclipsed only by Valve. Bungie all but guaranteed the success of the Xbox when they released Halo in 2001, followed it up with four beloved sequels before selling the brand to Microsoft, and have spent the last decade plus under Sony ownership developing the Destiny series and mountains of DLC. Their new game Marathon launched in March. But despite these successes, the numbers no longer add up and last week Sony announced it was laying off hundreds of Bungie workers, including most of the Destiny team and some working on Marathon. Forbes has been covering the collapse closely, and published an insider’s take yesterday: “… extra funds were often immediately misused by leadership at the time, funneled intoway too many simultaneous incubation projects or ideas like spending tens of millions on a new, unneeded 208,000 square foot headquarters.” The siren song of Seattle-area commercial real estate speculation claims another captain’s crew.
Washington Sues Trump Administration Over Medicaid Work Requirements: Millions of Americans are set to lose their health insurance after Congress passed work requirements for Medicaid recipients, just as austerity hawks planned. The feds have to implement the new work requirements, and Washington’s Attorney General Nick Brown is suing along with 23 other states because they say the implementation is so shoddy it’s going to kick people off Medicaid who are working or qualify for exemptions. Read more from the AG’s office here.
Mayor Wilson Endorses a Tech Entrepreneur and a Challenger to State Senate Majority Leader: With Washington’s August 4 primary election little more than a month away, the Democrat on Democrat violence is heating up. Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson endorsed two candidates for the state legislature over the weekend: tech entrepreneur Ron Davis for a House seat in North Seattle, and first-time candidate Hannah Sabio-Howell for a Senate seat in a district that includes Capitol Hill, the University District, and downtown. The Davis endorsement seems like a no-brainer for Wilson considering how much money Davis helped raise for her mayoral campaign, though he and incumbent Gerry Pollet are now both being out-fundraised by white-shoe litigator Will Dreher. The Sabio-Howell endorsement is more controversial. Unlike Davis, she’s not challenging a vulnerable lower house moderate, but rather Jamie Pedersen, the state Senate majority leader (and most progressive one in state history) who also happens to be arguably the most powerful gay person in Washington, maybe ever. Pedersen is also at a key point in the long, ongoing crusade to legalize the kind of graduated income taxation people like Wilson have been clamoring for for years to fund progressive policy, so he’s pissed. “I am not sure what she disagrees with me about,” he told the Seattle Times.
There’s Another World Cup Match Here Tomorrow, and I’d Prefer to Talk About Literally Anything Else: Seattle’s first elimination round of the Men’s World Cup is Wednesday between Senegal and Belgium. My Flemish is about as good as my Fulani, so I can’t read the hometown dugout reporters for a proper idea of who might win. But I can tell you this: hundreds of thousands of “Senegalese” soldiers fought in the French army during both World Wars, even holding the line in Flanders on the Front de l’Yser in 1914, saving Belgian honor by keeping at least one small corner of the nation unoccupied by the Germans. This is to say the Belgian team ought to crawl out onto the pitch Wednesday on their hands and knees. We write “Senegalese” in quotes because that’s the colonial term the French used for most soldiers recruited (or press-ganged) from the many peoples between the Sahara and the right bank of the Congo. Across the river the Belgians ruled, committing crimes so infamous during their pillage of the land’s natural resources—including the uranium for the US atomic bombs—that Seattle public school children read cautionary fables about it even today. Something we don’t teach our kids is that after the war, we and the Belgians butchered, literally, the Congolese independence leader who said the nation’s mineral wealth belonged to its people, Patrice Lumumba.
But the Democratic Republic of the Congo has returned to the World Cup for the first time in 52 years, and Lumumba has returned too. Or at least impersonator Michel Kuka Mboladinga is making it seem that way, standing motionless in the crowd as a living statue, arm raised atop his plinth, in a patriotic suit during Congo’s loss to Colombia in Guadalajara, Mexico. Mboladinga was denied an entrance visa to the US for Congo’s match against Uzbekistan in Atlanta over the weekend, but the DRC won handily despite his absence. They play in Atlanta again Wednesday against the English, whose language I understand just enough to tell you they’re the odds-on favorite to win. Unless the Congolese have their ringer.
There’s Another Lebanon War Powers Vote Today: Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib’s previous bill failed 91-324 after 117 of her fellow Democrats voted against it earlier this month, including Washington representatives Suzan DelBene, Rick Larsen, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, Kim Schrier and Adam Smith. Keep an eye on how they vote today on Tlaib’s bill to, in her words, “end U.S. participation in the Israeli apartheid regime’s campaign of ethnic cleansing and territorial expansion in Lebanon.”
New Hit Piece on Gluesenkamp Perez Actually Makes Her Sound More Fun: Despite being so unpopular among local progressives that she was nearly censured at the Washington Democrats convention this month for voting for a Republican anti-trans bill, MGP is still a Democrat in a purple district, and the party is still behind her. She faces a tough reelection campaign, and one of America’s best right-wing rags, The New York Post, has a new hit piece listing off the goofy stuff she did at Reed College. I take particular offense at her alleged fundraising for the campus Renn Fayre because of its “Pictish” nude run of blue-painted students, as the Picts are a thousand years anachronistic to the Renaissance.
Princeton Lied About Climate Change for Oil Money: That about says it all. ProPublica has the details on how the Ivy pushed the bunk scientific solution of carbon capture in exchange for funding from BP.
It’s Movie Time: Gothic freak Robert Eggers of The VVitch and Nosferatu is back with another bleak old-ountry ghoul picture, and there’s a new trailer out. Can you guess what the creature feature Werwulf is about?
