The Seattle Times seems to be on a hilarious mission to fuck up Seattle City Light CEO Jorge Carrasco's Google search results. As you may recall, while the city council was considering giving him an enormous pay raise this month, the Seattle Times discovered and published the fact that City Light had paid an online reputation management company more than $17,000 to clean up Google results for the utility and for Carrasco. Public officials paying to hide negative stories and promote positive ones to burnish their reputation—it was an embarrassing, Google-result-fucking story itself. Columnists at the Seattle Times wrote about the fiasco, too, a couple of times. More bad press, bad links. (The Seattle City Council authorized Carrasco's raise anyway last week.)

Then this morning, on the paper's front page, comes this piece:

Last year, two men claiming to be members of the Cherokee Nation who had traveled from Oklahoma came to Seattle with a simple goal: score some scrap copper.

Dressed in beads and fringed suede, with one wearing a cap that said “Native,” they headed to the offices of Seattle City Light, where they chanced upon its superintendent, Jorge Carrasco, in the lobby. They told him they ran a nonprofit that taught disabled children how to make jewelry and needed some copper wire.

Minutes after meeting them, Carrasco authorized the men to be given some scrap.

But the two were actually con men. Once inside City Light’s secure facilities, they were able to drive off with 20 tons of copper wire and scrap metal worth $120,000

The city getting bilked for $120,000 because without any vetting, they let strangers drive into a building full of valuable metal is an interesting story. But in this case, it's an old story, and while the article claims to have new information about Carrasco's involvement, it doesn't actually seem to have any, given that his involvement was well-reported this last winter when the two con artists were charged in King County Court.

So I guess I'm just assuming that someone over there has "Mock Jorge Carrasco as often as possible" written on their whiteboard to-do list for the month. Which, frankly, sounds more like something The Stranger would do. Well-played, ST, we see you. Anyone wanna start a countdown to the next article?