Washington’s pasty urban press corps wasn’t paying much attention to the Yakima Valley heading into the election as a state legislative district that Democrats could flip. But they’re paying attention now. Republicans lost control for the first time in decades after the area’s Latino majority understandably turned on them. The Seattle Times has since dispatched Danny Westneat. Republicans have run Latino candidates in the region for years to account for their large vote share, which Familias Unidas por la Justicia farmworker labor organizer Edgar Franks described as “doing their own little DEI projects by trying to recruit these conservative Latinos and grooming them to be in office.”
But Trump’s ethnic cleansing campaign made the GOP brand toxic to Latinos, and the partisan swing in the 14th for Chelsea Dimas is more intense than anywhere else in the state. When Dimas first challenged Gloria Mendoza for the open House seat in the 14th in 2024, Mendoza beat her by 8 points—a blowout. Two years later, even with the incumbent advantage, Rep. Mendoza lost to Dimas by 16 points, a 23 point swing for the Democrats. Also impressive is Ezequiel Morfin’s toppling of incumbent Rep. Deb Manjarrez, who squeaked by in 2024 at 51-49 only to lose this year 41-58.
In a celebratory post, Dimas wrote that she hopes Mendoza “takes the time to reflect on the loud and clear message our working-class communidad sent this election.”
A little further to the east, one of Washington’s two remaining Republican Congressmen is throwing a temper tantrum over his fellow House members talking to the press. Rep. Michael Baumgartner managed to stay afloat during the blue wave, and, like many House reps, has never had to deal with a very robust local press corps. He’s used to media in his district publishing the statements he prepares for public consumption, and can’t stand it when reporters learn what he’s saying in private (the true self). Baumgartner has pledged not to vote for any caucus leader that speaks with Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News, an empty threat. When running for Congress in the distant past of 2012, he infamously told a reporter “go fuck yourself” in response to a pretty normal question.
You know what’s a lot like fucking? Ranked-choice voting: At least according to Alaska Dems, whose coalition by latest count has secured an effective trifecta in state government for the first time in decades. Seattle gets ranked choice voting for next year’s municipal election, requiring our local conservative activists to update their conspiracies about how Tammany Hall foreigners are stuffing the ballot boxes. Peltola is still ahead in Alaska’s US Senate race, which means Trump still says it’s rigged.
KING 5 News report on Irish crime divides local racist community: While it’s not exactly Whitey Bulger, KING 5 has been tracking the local affiliate of a nationwide construction fraud ring run by Irish nationals for months. Their latest report focused on an accused Irish fraudster who was deported by ICE but managed to get back into the country and get back to “work.” Local chuds in the social media comments are divided between modern-minded postwar racists upset the broadcaster is highlighting crime by white immigrants, and old school hibernophobic Know-Nothings fearful of evermore Catholic Democrats tipping the scales.
A Pacific Northwest senator exits the revolving door as a Palantir Man: The only real Irish Democrat power base in the Pacific Northwest sat atop the farthest reaches of the Columbia, but when the mines went so did the party influence of Butte and Anaconda. In the absence of a firm labor movement, Montana Democrats drifted into the pocket of national corporate interests rather than homegrown oligarchs, an odyssey best exemplified by former Sen. Jon Tester. Casting himself as a humble dirt farmer, Tester’s real job in DC was to set the Pentagon and CIA budget as Chairman of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, a job that made him many friends in the world of politics and weapons. The most right-wing Senate Democrat outside the former slave states, Tester blamed woke party branding for losing his seat in 2024 as the state party continued its collapse. He was a driving force behind the doomed scheme by state party bigwigs and rightist donors to run a Democratic candidate for Senate as an Independent, which saw the blue wave gently lap at Montana’s shores last week instead of dashing Montana Republicans on the rocks. But Tester has a new job now, shilling for Palantir. Considering that Tester for a time during the first Yemen war was the second largest Democratic recipient in the Senate of Lockheed Martin donations, his new relationship is unsurprising. He has a type.
And who was the biggest Lockheed recipient among Senate Dems back then? Why none other than Chuck Schumer, who’s angling to be Senate majority leader, but facing notable backlash from progressives given his propensity to roll over and play dead. Sen. Chris Van Hollen, who is not so deep in the pocket of weapons manufacturers and AIPAC, is knocking at Chucky’s door, Democracy Now reports.
Lockheed weapons are still killing kids in Yemen: A New York Times investigation into a recent Saudi airstrike in Yemen found a US-supplied bomb with a Lockheed Martin guidance system killed nine members of a single family, including five children, and wounded 19 others, including 13 children. In summarizing the 12 years of war the US has subjected the Yemeni people to, the Times makes a polite mistake, saying the first phase of fighting ended in 2016 when “international condemnation ultimately forced the coalition to pull back.” If only. Instead, we starved Yemen for years, oblivious to all criticism, and, like in our other wars, only ended the carnage after being defeated on the battlefield. It was Yemeni drone and missile attacks on Saudi Arabia’s oil industry that forced KSA bombers to cease their attacks, a harbinger of the large scale Ansarallah aerial counteroffensives that have crippled Saudi oil exports in this latest war.
Speaking of Yemeni air attacks on Saudi oil infrastructure, Ansarallah struck the Riyadh skyscraper headquarters of Saudi national oil company Aramco over the weekend, the BBC reports.
Boeing layoffs loom for commercial aircraft sector: The commercial air travel industry relies on cheap fuel, and the war hasn’t been good for that. It hasn’t been good for manufacturers either. Boeing announced thousands of layoffs yesterday in its commercial sector, as the company plans to build fewer planes, meaning it needs fewer employees, the Seattle Times reports. Luckily the company’s weapons division has plenty of orders that will continue to keep the Greater Seattle economy afloat.
Someone, definitely not me, wants Jimothy dead: If Boeing holds up half the sky, the other pillar of the local economy is Etsy craftsmen. Jimothy the deformed racoon has become a cash cow for local knickknack peddlers, meaning recent threats against his life as reported by KIRO 7 could have disastrous effects on local small businesses. They’re not coming for Jimothy, they’re coming for you, Jimothy’s just in the way. We can’t let him die, he’s too valuable.
Everyone in Seattle is a “socialist” until it’s time to see a three-hour Polish film about industrialization with me: SIFF finished off their Andrzej Wajda retrospective this weekend, where I (alone) caught The Promised Land, wherein a degenerated Polish nobleman, the German scion of a failed factory, and a hard-drinking Jewish speculator put aside medieval prejudice to rip off every class of person in Tsarist Łódź. This being a communist film from the 1970s directed by a veteran of the Home Army, you can guess the kind of smokestacks Wajda alludes the march of history is heading toward as the plot enters the early 20th century.
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