Scootering is the best part of life. Thank you Benevolent Jenny Durkan for this gift and not stalling the process at all whatsoever. Send Tweet.
"Scootering is the best part of life. Thank you Benevolent Jenny Durkan for this gift and not stalling the process at all whatsoever. Send Tweet." freemixer/Getty Images

Jenny Durkan budges on scooter share: Durkan is finally allowing Seattle to get e-scooters. We're one of the last major cities in the country to allow an e-scooter pilot. Durkan has notoriously been against them mostly because she is afraid they're unsafe. In a very tentative—and I don't know if I'm biased here but it feels very... begrudging?—1,500 word op-ed, Durkan announces that we'll try them out. Only if providers agree to safety and liability conditions.

Seattle is collecting less trash around homeless encampments: It's a tricky situation. The city can't really allocate funds and programs to collect what it classifies as illegal encampments. There have been city programs that have been somewhat successful where Seattle Public Utilities handed out disposable purple trash bags and collected them at encampments for free. But, the program was far-reaching and not every encampment participated. This whole issue feels like a vicious cycle; the public detests seeing dirty homeless encampments but encampments aren't given the basic services to keep themselves clean and so trash accumulates and anger intensifies. What's to be done? Who the fuck knows, but Councilmember Lisa Herbold is looking for room in the budget to expand these clean-up programs.

Council to vote on change to city's paid family-care ordinance: The change would allow parents employed by the city to take paid time off if their child dies. Currently—and yeah I'm flabbergasted too—there's no paid leave for a city employee whose kid dies. You can't take any time to grieve as a recently bereaved parent! So, under Bea's Law—made after a city employee's daughter who lived only 3 hours (the employee had to go back to work three days after giving birth and her daughter's death)—parents who lose a child under 18 and adults unable to care for themselves because of a disability will be included in the family-care ordinance.

This is who's playing during Volunteer Park Pride Festival: It's the best free one-day music festival in the city, according to Capitol Hill Seattle blog.


Coke funds studies, it can also kill them: Coca-Cola (yeah, that coke) has been funding health studies at public universities. Those funding agreements also came with a catch: the company had the ability to review and kill any studies it didn't like. The University of Washington was one of the universities that received this funding according to the University of Cambridge. Cambridge's Department of Politics and International Studies reviewed around 87,000 documents. There are a lot of redactions in the documents but there's no evidence of Coke ever killing a study according to the report. However, researchers say the documents "don't tell the whole story." Correction: From UW, "There is one gift letter to the UW from 2015 cited in the Journal of Public Health Policy article, and the letter does not contain publication approval terms or other rights to guide, influence, suppress information – nor does it include a termination clause."

Did you hear the good news?? Strippers are getting workplace protections in Washington state!!!

Inslee signs bill to support year-round daylight saving time: We're one step closer to stopping that fall-back spring-ahead nonsense. This is just the latest effort on the West Coast to dump daylight saving time altogether, following California's passage of a similar bill in 2018. Before anything can happen Congress will have to approve it.

Wear deoderant tomorrow:


Don Jr. subpoenaed: The good news for Don Jr. is that maybe his dad will notice him finally. The bad news is that it's because Senate Intelligence Committee has subpoenaed him to go over some shit from the Russia investigation. It probably has to do with that Trump Tower Moscow Project, something Don Jr. said he was only "peripherally aware of" but that Trump's former attorney and newly-incarcerated man Michael Cohen said he briefed Don Jr. and Ivanka Trump on around 10 times during the presidential campaign.

One student dead in Colorado high school shooting: Another student, just like 21-year-old Riley Howell in North Carolina last week, was gunned down trying to rush a gunman. Kendrick Castillo, 18, was shot dead when he rushed the gunman who entered his Colorado classroom on Tuesday. Eight other students were wounded. According to the New York Times, a group of boys in Castillo's class tackled the gunman and allowed the rest of the class to escape. They're heroes, but they shouldn't fucking have to be.


Denver just decriminalized shrooms: While having mushrooms is still technically illegal in Denver, it just passed the first public referendum that makes having or using psilocybin mushrooms the "lowest law enforcement priority in the City and County of Denver." Initial reports showed that the referendum was failing so this is a surprising—and still breaking—development.

Wanna see something crazy? Look at all these guns recovered from a raid on a Bel-Air mansion by Los Angeles Police Department and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.


Roe v. Wade who? Fuck the sly dismantling of Roe v. Wade that's happening on a state level across the country. States are chipping away at a woman's right to choose through ass backward legislation like the heartbeat bill that was just signed in Georgia where women who get abortions after 6 weeks could get life in prison AND THE DEATH PENALTY. There's a bill that Ohio is considering that will classify FORMS OF BIRTH CONTROL AS ABORTION. It also includes ectopic pregnancies where embryos from outside of the womb. The Republican sponsor of the bill said that in those cases they would remove the embryo and reinsert it into the uterus SOMETHING THAT IS NOT MEDICALLY POSSIBLE. This legislation is insane and dangerous and if you can't tell I am IRATE and sadly unsurprised.


The House voted to hold Barr in contempt: The House Judiciary Committee has moved to hold Attorney General William Barr in contempt for violating a subpoena to release the unredacted Mueller report. The vote was 24-to-16. That happened just hours after Trump used executive privilege to shield the full unredacted report from being released. Cool. That's not shady at all.

A cute video for your hump day: