Serve, protect, mechanize: The FAA granted the Redmond Police Department a waiver that allows them to deploy drones without a second officer to watch the airspace. As long as there’s one pilot-certified officer to fly, the department can deploy drones to any call they want. Redmond is the second department on the West Coast to receive the waiver. While police say drones allow them to monitor dangerous situations without risking human life, there are immense privacy implications to expanding unchecked, warrantless aerial surveillance.

Get your shots: Public health experts say COVID, flu, and RSV vaccination rates are low ahead of the holidays and all the travel that comes with it. Vaccination is safe, and protects you and everyone around you.

ICYMI: I wrote you a permission slip to spend the holidays how you want. It doesn’t expire, and is for anyone who could use it.

Fix it, Joe! Steve Marose, a former Air Force Lieutenant from Renton, was court-martialed in 1990 for having gay sex. He spent 18 months in prison for this “crime.” Since then, the “crimes” have lived on his permanent record. While Joe Biden announced a pardon for similarly court-martialed queer veterans this June, only eight including Marose, have applied because of the narrow limitations and a cumbersome application. The pardon could change lives, restore access to Veterans Affairs benefits, travel to some countries, and the right to vote in many states. We have no clue if Trump will end or sideline the process, so the government should hurry up.

Heard about the “People’s Budget” in Seattle, but the process seemed confusing? Oh, it was, but Hannah has you covered on how the Council fumbled your housing and infrastructure needs in service of the police and the rich.

 

 

Mystery solved? In 1971, D.B. Cooper boarded a Boeing plane in Portland, hijacked it with the threat of a bomb, demanded $200,000 in cash and four parachutes upon landing in Seattle, directed the pilots to take off for Mexico City, and leapt into the air above Ariel, Washington, never to be seen, or heard from, again. Or, was he killed in a police shootout following a similar heist over Utah? According to Cowboy State Daily, Richard McCoy II may be D.B. Cooper. The FBI had suspected McCoy, but closed the case in 2016, unless someone found the parachutes or money. McCoy’s kids and Dan Gryder, a skydiving YouTuber, provided just that: a modified military surplus parachute McCoy had carefully stashed in a storage unit. Last year, the FBI took the chute into evidence, along with McCoy’s skydiving logbook, which aligned with both crimes.

Hezbollah strikes a ceasefire deal with Israel: Thousands in packed cars are returning home to Southern Lebanon. International aid groups worry about the aftershocks of the war in Lebanon, which displaced 1.2 million and destroyed 100,000 homes. Half of the population now lives below the poverty line.

 

No ceasefire for Gaza: An Israeli strike on a school in Gaza City this morning killed at least 12 people. Palestinians who spoke to Al Jazeera hope the ceasefire in Lebanon could lead to one in Gaza. Hamas says it wants an agreement to stop the war, free Israeli hostages in Gaza, and free Palestinians from Israeli jails. More than 44,000 Palestinians have died in Gaza.

Now that he’s picked his team, Donald Trump signs a transition deal: They now can meet with outgoing staff and federal agencies, but won’t get any classified information because they’re not allowing the FBI to run security clearances. A smooth, peaceful transition of power ensures stability, but don’t worry, Trump’s Chief of Staff, Susan Wiles, says the transition team didn’t sign the agreement at first because it already had security and information protections built in, meaning they didn’t “require additional government and bureaucratic oversight.” We’re so glad you think so!

Make it stop: Trump named gay billionaire Scott Bessent as his pick for Secretary of the Treasury, proving once and for all that democratic governments rapidly deteriorating into kleptocratic autocracies can slay, queen.

Speaking of the economy: Can Trump actually impose 60 percent tariffs on China and 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico by executive order, which is sort of like pressing a giant red button marked “inflation” over and over and over and over and over until avocado toast does make the difference between buying a house or not? Yes, probably. Trump’s tariffs would violate existing trade agreements, but presidents have plenty of authority on tariffs. Whether that’d be overreach without congressional approval is an open question.

Shh! He speaks for Jesus: Speaker of the House and noted anti-gay bigot Mike Johnson told Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on “This Week on the Hill” that when Delaware elected Sarah McBride to congress, Republicans had to speak with moral clarity and compression on the issue, so he firmly supports banning trans people like her from using the bathrooms and other single-sex spaces at the Capitol. “I ask myself every day, ‘What would Jesus do? I think he would hold, obviously, to the principles we believe in,”’ Johnson said. Buddy, nail down your tables. Jesus is gonna flip ’em if he’s coming back any time soon.

Vivian McCall is The Stranger's interim Editor-in-Chief. In her private life, she is a musician and Wii U apologist. If you’re reading this, you either love her or hate her.

124 replies on “Slog AM: FAA Gives Special Drone Privileges to Redmond PD, Ceasefire in Lebanon, Did They Find D.B. Cooper?”

  1. @46: “Are not homophobia and transphobia two separate things?”

    No, not really. They’re both hateful bigotry against persons who are not exactly like me, i.e. cis-het in sexual identity and sexuality. There’s absolutely no valid excuse for either (although religion is sometimes cited as an excuse), and each form of hateful bigotry should receive exactly the same strenuous opposition. You seem to persist in the belief you have the luxury of opposing one, but not the other. You are very, very wrong about that, and you may be in for a rude surprise, when the hateful bigots you’re now carefully not opposing finally come for you anyway.

    A healthy society is like a healthy house. Neither has human waste lying around inside it. When we’re trying to clean out our dirty home, your endless turd-curation — and your obsessive polishing of the turds you just so happen to like — is a worse-than-worthless distraction from our communal cleaning our house. Not everyone in our home has the tolerance for needless filth-borne disease you claim you have. (And, before you can even begin your tiresomely predictable manufacture of your tiresomely predictable fake outrage, I’ll state explicitly my metaphor here is to beliefs held by some humans, not to any humans themselves.)

  3. @101, You’re not very bright. He’s not saying you can’t personally be transphobic and not homophobic — you can hate whatever minority group you want — he is saying that politically, trans and gay rights are indistinguishable from each other. You can’t throw trans people to the wolves and expect MAGA to spare the rest of “the alphabet people” or any other minority for that matter, though from what I can tell that’s a feature not a bug for you.

  4. Tensorna: Sexual orientation, gender dysphoria, and autogynephilia are the current buckets of how we’re defining and discussing humans. You’re wrapping it up in sociopolitical context to describe your agenda points to while totally ignoring individual feelings and experiences in the different groups. People are more complex.

    Also, please don’t be insulting to me. I’m not that way to you. Please be civil.

  6. @104, You are the living embodiment of the “first they came for” poem. Politically there is no distinguishing between any minority groups — race, religion, gender, sexuality, it’s all the same to them, because scapegoating the vulnerable is how they distract the masses to consolidate power and rob us all blind. Solidarity is the only way to defeat them.

    It’s truly incredible to think we all grew up learning about the dangers of right wing extremism and there are still dipshits like you who are too dumb to take note because you think your particular strain of bigotry happens to be the correct one. We had nearly a century to prepare for this but I guess if you think you have nothing to lose the stakes are basically nonexistent for you. You’ll figure it out eventually though by then it will be too late.

  7. @105: Sorry, that tired “last act of Cabaret” schtick is pure delusion and scare tactics by the radical left. It ran out of steam when people, gays included, realized they’d been had and are not taking it anymore. They’re not token minorities to be aggregated into anyone’s political agenda.

    We know where we disagree now at least.

  8. Where we differ has been abundantly clear to me from the get go — you are racist and lgbtq-phobic. You’re just figuring this out now? You’re even dimmer than I thought. You’ve made it clear that MAGA’s racism and ‘phobia aren’t the dealbreakers for you, just that Trump doesn’t put the same glossy sheen on it that Reagan et al did.

    The overwhelming majority of gays support the entire rainbow but of course there are some that are clueless enough to think they can distinguish the LGB’s fate from the T’s if they play nice with fascists. Every far right movement throughout history had members of persecuted communities who were delusional enough to think they could save themselves. Our transphobic and MAGA gays will learn the hard way just like you, though they have way more at stake than you do..

  9. @103: “Sexual orientation, gender dysphoria, and autogynephilia are the current buckets of how we’re defining and discussing humans.”

    Actually, everyone here except you has been talking about basic civil rights for all minorities. You’re the one obsessed with keeping trans’ persons as a separate minority, reserved as targets for continued bigoted discrimination. We’re telling you history shows the large inherent danger your approach holds for all of our liberties, and you’re denying that well-documented reality. I sincerely hope such denial never has unpleasant consequences for you, but if you do suffer for your bigoted folly, you can’t say we didn’t warn you.

    “Also, please don’t be insulting to me. I’m not that way to you.”

    Stating deeply offensive ideas in superficially polite language doesn’t make them any less offensive, it merely makes them all the more tiresome, knowing you will inevitably complain about the predictable response you’ve intentionally provoked.

    @106: As previously mentioned in this thread, poor women in red states have already lost their rights to sepsis-free abortions. The reactionary right happily spent fifty years of diligent effort to accomplish that rollback of vital civil liberties. They’re willing to work another fifty years to shove you back into the closet — or maybe to somewhere even worse, to a place which endangers your life as much as back-alley abortions now threaten the lives of poor rape victims in red states. Your arrogant complacency is part of what they need to succeed.

  10. @95, If you are going to characterize Jesus, at least do so accurately:

    10Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”

    11“No one, sir,” she said. “Then neither do I condemn you,”Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.” – Jn 8.10-11.

    He did pal around with prostitutes and other outcasts of his time. What is his message of love to them? “Go now and leave your life of sin.”

    By your moral norms that is not love, but bigotry, if you are looking at the Jesus of the historical record, not your fictitious Jesus.

  11. Great point, Jesus was actually an asshole and the “love thy neighbor” bullshit is just PR for a retrograde cult desperate to remain relevant in an increasingly tolerant society. This is after all the same holy book people used to justify everything from torture to slavery to protesting the funerals of fallen soldiers over the centuries.

    I feel even better about judging christians now, so thank you for that. Maybe you’re good for something after all.

  12. “The overwhelming majority of gays support the entire rainbow”

    It used to be a nice, simple, joyful spectrum of colors representing anyone who wants to identify. Now it’s a broken rainbow peppered with symbols not everyone understands.

  13. @110 – You can’t say Jesus was an asshole and be for LBGTQ rights at the same time. This is because you’re intolerant of people’s faith and spirituality – and like it or not Christianity helps people to live healthy and productive lives, as does Islam.

    Your outlook on life is quite shallow, but you’re young. Wisdom comes with age.

  18. @112, I’m not intolerant of people’s faith at all. I am intolerant of people who drag their archaic hateful beliefs into our politics where it does not belong.

    I encourage you to learn how sarcasm works. Dude @109 made an incredibly strange defense of Christianity that Jesus was actually super judgy irl and all the commonly understood pleasantries about the faith are made up. I found this deeply funny, so I made a little joke.

    I have very religious people in my life, but they all buy into the parts where you’re supposed to respect everyone and leave the judgement up to god. Apparently, the mean girl christians had it right all along, so it sounds like you can sleep well knowing you’re in good standing with the lord almighty.

  20. Sorry but I call it as I see it. Your religious beliefs are your own business but the minute you use them to justify taking rights away from people, you are a bad person, full stop.

    The Christian political movement in this country is outwardly hateful towards queer people, among others, and seeks to strip American citizens of our freedoms. Right now women are dying needlessly because this movement stripped them of their right to basic medical care. This kind of fundamentalism isn’t just hateful, it’s downright evil, and so are you for defending it.

  21. @88 etc. – it may well be that it is ALL FUCKING RELIGIONS that are the problem. No reason to get all wrapped up in which one is causing the most problems this year.

  22. @119: ” justify taking rights away from people”

    That’s an absurd extrapolation, but just to put you on the spot – which comment are you referring to?

  23. You’re an idiot. I am not extrapolating anything, I am accurately describing the motives of a religious fundamentalist movement that has already successfully taken rights from Americans and will take even more of them over the next 4 years.

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