The allegations against the Spokesman Review’s suspended editor in chief are extensive: When longtime Spokesman Review editor Rob Curley was suspended by the paper’s owner in August, followed by a vote of no confidence from his staff, a lot of people wondered what the hell was going on. As the city was engulfed in flames at the time, there were bigger priorities to attend to, but the details are out now, courtesy of a lengthy investigation by RANGE Media and Investigate West. The details are worth reading in full for yourself, but in short, newsroom employees accuse their Disney adult editor of compromising the editorial independence of the paper, nepotistic hiring, lying about reporters being paid with community donations, retaliation, cronyism, and, worst of all hiring a personally loyal but “disorganized and unproductive editor who often shopped online for magician supplies while in the office.” Curley has long survived criticism with the backing of one of Spokane’s richest families, which owns the paper, but his suspension, his staff’s vote of no confidence, and the public allegations he now faces make him seem destined to be sealed back into the Disney Vault for good.
We’re Gone! A Dinosaur’s Story: Wandering around Minoru Yamsaki’s delightful United States Science Pavilion this weekend, I noticed something: the triceratops and the stegosaurus statues are gone. Luckily for me Seattle Times reporter Ann Duan noticed their absence, too, and actually looked into it. Some of the animatronics from the recently closed dinosaur exhibit, including the tyrannosaur that haunted my dreams as a child, are still on display near the main entrance. However, there is still an important animatronic missing, one that also used to occupy the space near the interior stairs, and which no one seems to remember, even though it talked, and sometimes, killed.
Production of the pro-ICE action film in Montana isn’t going great: Speaking of racist movies shot in the Pacific Northwest, production is back on for the Daily Wire-produced movie about ICE fighting antifa and MS-13 in Minneapolis after the local film board shut down filming in Livingston, Montana over resident complaints.
The state legislative districts redrawn to empower one of Washington’s few Latino majority communities might be in trouble: Washington state Republicans have dragged the matter through the courts for years after redistricting, worried that empowering the Latino majority will result in farmworkers electing Democrats over the Republicans who serve agribusiness. The US Supreme Court just kicked the decision back down to the lower courts to decide, the Seattle Times reports.
The farmworker movement is making a play in the 14th district, which you can familiarize yourself with in this new Yakima Herald profile. Here’s what Democratic challenger Chelsea Dimas has to say about the lack of collective bargaining rights for farmworkers, the movement’s top issue in the legislature last session that was torpedoed by Democrats crossing the aisle: “This last session I went up with [United Farm Workers] and many of the workers to try to lobby for this law… unfortunately, that didn’t pass. It is something I’m incredibly passionate about, and that is something I am willing to challenge my own party on because I truly believe that farmworkers should no longer continue to be the exception in our unionization and collective bargaining laws.”
“Minimal early morning cancellations” is how the Washington State Ferries rosily described operations this morning after yesterday’s wildcat strike of engineers over low pay and understaffing. That’s not “no cancellations” … Ferry workers pulling a sickout is only the proximate cause of the ferry service disruption. The ultimate cause is the political decision made by Gov. Bob Ferguson to not raise the necessary taxes to fund government services because it is unpopular, and therefore refusing wage increases for state workers despite the skyrocketing cost of living, which means an effective pay cut to real wages. If you push people to their limit, they will push back. And even if there are only a few dozen of them, unlike larger public employee unions, their scarcity makes them irreplaceable. As all union workers know, there are Straits of Hormuz everywhere for those with the eyes to see them.
Oil exports through the Strait of Hormuz have reached pre-war levels, so why is gas still so expensive? One big reason is transportation costs. Hazard pay and warzone insurance isn’t cheap, raising costs for suppliers that have to be recouped down the line from you, the consumer. Bloomberg’s description of supertankers running dark close to the Omani shore at night is harrowing. The Saudis tried to avoid the Hormuz hazard by using their pipeline to the Red Sea export terminals instead, but it was bombed.
Canadian crude is also expensive for this reason—it costs a lot to liquify tar sands and ship it from the heart of North America to coastal export terminals and refineries, which is why the Canadian and US governments built the Dakota Access Pipeline through Native American communities. They failed to build the Keystone XL pipeline after a federal lawsuit in Montana, so to reduce transportation costs and make the oil sands more lucrative, the Canadians want a new pipeline west across the Rockies terminating at the BC coast right above Washington’s border. KOUW reports Gov. Ferguson is worried increased tanker traffic would endanger orcas, and you’ve got to expect he’s real tired of talking about ships right now.
Houthis encircle Saudi-backed forces in a key city: Saudi-backed forces advanced across some of the flat coastal plain around the Bab al-Mandab Strait yesterday, which is where all the oil shipping is, and thus captured a lot of international headlines, even though they have since lost those gains. But the Houthis captured something more important, a number of highland villages south of Taiz, cutting the only road to one of Yemen’s largest cities, the Associated Press reports. Saudi-backed forces have long held Taiz even as the Houthis reached the outskirts, but Ansar Allah has in the past few days advanced across the ridgelines in the countryside outside the city and encircled it. The fight is now a grim siege. Without Taiz, the Saudi-backed faction has little claim to power.
I tried to see The History of Concrete this weekend but it was sold out, so instead I watched two hours of behind-the-scenes interviews on the creation of Everybody Loves Raymond. I think the cast and crew give John Wilson a real run for his money, so instead of my usual appeal to watch some foreign documentary shot on Mini DV tape in 2002, I instead offer you the late Doris Roberts knowing her character Marie Barone better than most of you know yourselves.
