Last Month This Month is a recap of all the previous month's news, featuring headlines from Slog AM. Find it in every issue of The Stranger! Subscribe to our daily Slog AM newsletter here.
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Katie Wilson is the new mayor. After being edged and edged and edged by King County Elections’ slow, sensuous ballot-counting method, Wilson came out just over 2,000 votes ahead. Our crotches ache, and it’s not a mandate, but at least Bruce Harrell isn’t going to yell at us anymore. That was even harder to come to. If you have a heart, please consider donating to the Bruce Harrell Coping Society. They only have millions of dollars to make the pain go away.
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Much to the disappointment of corporate simps and adult baby milkshake lovers,
Wilson stood alongside striking Starbucks workers. Those silly workers want things like benefits and a resolution on more than 700 unfair labor practice claims.
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Trump found out who Katie Wilson was, called her a “beauty,” and then threatened to take away our precious FIFA World Cup because she was a liberal, or a communist. Everyone else called her a socialist.
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Wilson is not a socialist, as a number of headlines (and Wilson herself) claims. She is a democratic socialist. Democratic socialists want to counter the failures of capitalism. Socialists wanna abolish the capitalist class altogether. It’s making the rich split the dinner bill instead of eating them for dinner.
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City council approved non-socialist Harrell’s last budget. Don’t worry, conservatives, they left plenty of extra money to hire cops and scrub graffiti. And as a treat, it left a maze of fiscal cliffs for Wilson to fall off of.
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We like Wilson, but we’re kind of jealous of New York City for electing Zohran Mamdani. That vision? That charisma? That smokin’ hot wife? Mamdani even rizzed up Donald Trump, who, within hours of meeting him, dressed tastefully for the first time in his life. “You can say it,” Trump said, giving Mamdani a pass to say the f-word (call him a fascist) with a pat on the arm.
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Trump said six Democrat military veteran lawmakers (could? should?) be killed for the “seditious” act of telling the troops to disobey unconstitutional orders. That fucking f-word is earning his label every damn day.
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To celebrate Mamdani’s mayoral victory in his own special way, Dick Cheney died. Cheney was a classically evil man who presided over the Iraq War and all the terrorism we did to combat terrorism.
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A UPS cargo plane crashed in a fireball on the runway in Louisville, Kentucky, killing 14 people and injuring 23 more. Ideally, planes should not do this.
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Let’s not forget the despicable shutdown the numbskull Feds put us through: thousands of flight cancellations. Not paying federal workers. A tug-of-war will-they-won’t-they of food stamps funding between people with souls and Trump and the Trump Supreme Court.
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The US did not attend the UN’s climate talks in Brazil. We were too busy making pain and misery. Trump’s emissions-first policies could cause an additional 1.3 million temperature-related deaths in the 80 years after 2035. But hey, that’s a problem for Emperor Barron Trump II, Mecha Putin, and Martian President Zorp.
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The Seattle Fire Department’s former head of human resources alleges she was fired for trying to address on-duty drinking, sexual harassment, unsafe behavior, and someone slashing a female firefighter’s uniform with a box cutter. She wants $2.5 million from the city.
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There’s gonna be a new small local bookstore downtown. It’s called Barnes & Noble. Time for a You’ve Got Mail reboot, but Tom Hanks is the good guy. And Jeff Bezos falls in love with him and they get down crazy style in a Blue Origin spaceship? Yes.
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University of Washington star soccer goalkeeper Mia Hamant died after fighting a rare kidney cancer for seven months. She was 21. Since Mia’s death, the UW soccer team can’t stop winning. At press time, they were headed to the NCAA’s elite 8. Our dubs are so up.
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A jury of his peers found Sean Dunn, the former Justice Department paralegal, not guilty of a misdemeanor for chucking his Subway sandwich at federal agents this summer. The ridiculous case where a federal agent described it exploding on his bulletproof vest (he could smell the onions, the mustard) is funny, until you think about it. The government went to a lot of effort to convict this guy for a silly crime.
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The Congressional Budget Office was hacked, possibly by a “foreign actor.” Was it Ralph Fiennes?
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The Louvre Heist, during which thieves made off with $102 million in jewels, showed us something amazing about the French approach to IT. According to an employee, the password for the security system for the most famous art museum in the world was simply “Louvre.”
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And a French cyclist showed us something amazing about the French body. The 77-year-old man survived a fall down a 130-foot ravine. He was stuck for three days, and gained life force by suckling from the red wine he’d been toting in his grocery bags.
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France also showed us where they draw the line. The country ruined the grand opening of Shein’s first physical store in Paris when it suspended online sales over the prepubescent, “childlike” sex dolls on its website. Looking at them ruined our morning.
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Far-right Rep. Clay Higgins (R-Louisiana) isn’t doing his part in the War on Pedos. He became the loneliest boy in Congress when he voted against releasing the Epstein files. Literally everyone else in the House and Senate voted to release them.
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A judge dismissed indictments against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James because Trump appointed his prosecutor illegally. They should take themselves to court for being idiots.
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The watchful Feds have released the facial recognition app Mobile Identify so local law enforcement can help them round up immigrants. Jake Laperruque, deputy director of the Center for Democracy & Technology’s Security and Surveillance Project, told 404 Media that handing this helltool to police is “like asking a 16-year-old who just failed their drivers exams to pick a dozen classmates to hand car keys to.”
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Redmond shut off its AI-powered license plate scanners run by Flock—a private company that can’t be trusted to keep its data from Immigration and Customs Enforcement—after agents arrested seven people in the Eastside suburb.
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Our capacity for imperial violence has gone too far, even for England. The UK stopped sharing intelligence about boats in the Caribbean because they don’t want us to blow them up. According to CNN, the British think our judge, jury, and executioner act is illegal.
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For sale, historic funeral home, regularly used. Three months after an alleged arson turned the historic Columbia Funeral Home and Crematory to ash, the property is for sale. It’s going for a cool $7.5 million. Anyone in need of some ghost roommates?
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After he helped to get the Mariners closer to the World Series than they’ve ever been while the birth of his first child was imminent, first baseman Josh Naylor’s contract ended. Surprising fans, management actually invested in the team. Naylor’s got a five-year contract. He wanted to stick around for the Mariners’ team dog, Tucker. Way to go, dudes.
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King County Exec-Elect Girmay Zahilay reportedly plans to fire about 100 people in appointed positions in his office. Some of them will be invited to reapply—a tradition for the sake of morale. This turnover is normal, but shocking when you haven’t had a new executive in 16 years. At press time, Dow Constantine was playing with the toy trains in his office.
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Two female coyotes have been living near the Washington Park Arboretum. There is no evidence that they’re lesbians, but the state killed one of them for getting too comfortable around people, and that does sound like an Oscar-winning lesbo script circa 1997.
