• State senator Don Benton (R-Vancouver) has filed an ethics complaint against fellow Republican state senator Ann Rivers (R-La Center), accusing her of attacking him with a profanity-laced "uncontrollable tirade" that left him fearing "the threat of physical violence." Rivers has released a document admitting that she called Benton "a piece of shit" on April 19, after he followed her to her senate floor seat and repeatedly called her "weird."
• According to the Columbian, former Republican state senator Cheryl Pflug calls Senator Benton's complaint the "height of hypocrisy." Pflug claims that Benton cursed her out on the floor of the senate following her vote last year in favor of same-sex marriage: "He put his face up against mine and yelled, 'Fuck you! Fuck you!'" A lobbyist who witnessed the incident confirmed Pflug's story, telling the Columbian that Benton used the F-word "as a verb, and as a noun, and an adverb, and an adjective."
• On Monday, June 24, the Seattle City Council passed its bill appropriating $500,000 from the city's general fund to start a concerted effort to house or shelter every Nickelsville resident by September 1, albeit slightly amended. The bill originally cited New Orleans and Baltimore as cities worth emulating, as they "have been successful at moving most of the individuals off the streets." However, a quick look at the homeless populations in those cities (3,439 and 1,795, respectively) seems to suggest otherwise, a fact we pointed out on Slog. Council president Sally Clark said in the council meeting that "there was some reading of [the original] that made it sound like that had solved the homeless problem completely... which was not the intent of the wording." Oops!
• Another amendment to the council's Nickelsville outreach bill "adds the general fund appropriation of $500,000 that was inadvertently left out of the original," Clark said on the dais. "That's kind of a big one," she admitted. Double oops!
• Sources say that Jeremy Griffin, the South Seattle man whose house activists blockaded last month to prevent his foreclosure and eviction, could still lose his home. (Griffin fell behind on his mortgage during a period of unemployment, but now that he can pay again, Wells Fargo won't take his money.) After the blockade, Griffin won a stay on his eviction in King County court, but it expired on Tuesday, June 25, and a judge reinstated the eviction order. Griffin could be booted from his home as soon as next week.
• Delivering a gut-punch to the Northwest, the US Army Corps of Engineers announced on June 18 that it will not examine the impacts of climate change—including changes in air and water quality—when studying the environmental impacts of several proposed coal export terminals in Oregon and Washington. Environmentalists and local politicians were counting on those impacts to help kill the proposals. 
