Goood morning: I took a walk last night, because I’m on that steps grind, and goddamn it’s a beautiful time of year. It might rain today, but if it does it’ll be a sprinkle. The temperature will rise to 55 degrees. The sun will set at 6:20 pm. I hit 10,109 steps yesterday.
And now to other weather “news”: A Republican Washington State House candidate appears to believe the government can control the weather. Carrie R. Kennedy, who’s challenging Democratic State Representative Clyde Shavers up in the 10th Legislative District, which covers the islands, reposted a Bikers for America Facebook post about weather manipulation on October 13, which basically peddled the conspiracy theory that the US Government caused the recent East Coast hurricanes as part of an attempt to depopulate the country. None of that is true. She has posted similar conspiracies before on her Facebook and her X account. Keep in mind, this isn’t some kooky challenger way behind in the polls. Shavers only won the primary with 52 percent of the vote share. She’s got some juice.
After I reached out to Kennedy last night to ask about several of her weather manipulation posts, the Bikers for America post now no longer appears on her Facebook. Luckily we grabbed some screenshots.
Also missing from her feed is an October 8 repost of a post she wrote in 2020, which said, “If ‘they’ can create a virus, can ‘they’ control the weather?!!! Just sayin'”. She captioned it, “From 2020…” with a scratching chin emoji and a woman crossing her arms in front of her. The repost no longer appears on her page, but the original post remains. She did not respond to my request for comment. I hate fact-checking this shit, but, just a heads up, the government cannot control hurricanes, and just because the government can do one kind of science does not mean it can do another.
Boeing plans to cut white collar workers: Boeing machinist jobs remain safe for now as the aerospace company plans to lay off 10 percent of its workforce. The cuts appear mostly focused on white collar employees, such as engineers, and other non-union staff “at all levels up to vice presidents,” according to the Seattle Times. Boeing plans to notify the first wave of employees about the lay offs mid-November, with their final days planned for January 17.
The year without a Hilloween: The Broadway Business Improvement Area has cancelled the kids carnival on Broadway this Halloween, according to Capitol Hill Seattle Blog. Apparently, funding and sponsorship just failed to pan out this year. But there’s still plenty of other good stuff to come for Hilloween this year, including a Haunted Soiree at the DAR Rainier Chapter House. I’m so mad I missed the pet costume parade—goddamn I love those.
Work from the waterfront: There is lots of open office space along the waterfront, according the Seattle Times. With the opening of the Overlook Walk, which connects Pike Place with the waterfront, real estate interests in the area hope to see a resurgence in businesses moving into the open commercial spaces. I’m not much of a back-to-the-office stan, but I went to the Overlook Walk over the weekend, and honestly I’d work from the office two days a week if I could eat lunch there.
Jill Stein comes to town tonight: The anti-war Green Party candidate plans to speak tonight alongside former Seattle City Council Member Kshama Sawant. The event starts at 5 pm at Washington Hall on 14th Avenue in Seattle. If you can’t be there in person, it’s going to be live-streamed. For any of you ready to complain about Sawant supporting someone other than Vice President Kamala Harris for President, be cool and watch Rich tell you why that’s dumb. [Eds note: To be clear, he also thinks it’s dumb for Sawant to support Stein.]
Trump does something silly: Two medical incidents at a Trump town hall derailed the event, and Trump played some music and “bopped and shimmied,” as the Associated Press put it, to a really strange mix of songs, including Rufus Wainwright’s cover of “Hallelujah” and “Ave Maria.”
Hope he’s okay. https://t.co/WGhGteFpjm
— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) October 15, 2024
We need a shorter election cycle: The polls are tight. I’m depressed all the time, and, tbh, I’m one of those people who quits when shit gets tough. Good luck to everyone else. I’m following up on that promise from the Irish government that they’ll pay you to take over a sheep farm or whatever. Shit looks dark. If y’all mount a resistance movement I’ll send wool. [Eds note: Other options include spending some time phone-banking for Harris in battleground states, calling friends and family in battleground states to convince them to vote for Harris or to convince them to get off their asses and knock doors. But Ireland does sound nice.]
The geopolitical equivalent of blocking someone: North Korea blew up the some of the unused road and rail routes that used to connect it to South Korea, according to the Associated Press. Tensions rose a few days ago after North Korea accused South Korea of flying drones over Pyongyang. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said the two countries are never, ever, getting back together.
I’m on a music strike until my computer speakers get better. Listening to anything on this laptop makes my teeth hurt.
Editor’s note: This story was updated to correctly reflect the results in 10th Legislative District’s 2024 state house primary race.
I’m old enough to remember when The Stranger and its personalities, cough cough, Dan Savage, fell all over themselves defending Sawant. Now that’s she’s out in the open supporting the Putin-loving, David Duke endorsed Jill Stein and actively trying to undermine Kamala, there’s nothing but silence.
A vote for Jill Stein is a vote for Trump. Even worse, a vote for Jill Stein is a vote for Jill Stein.
In Nevada, Stein’s campaign was represented by Jay Sekulow, a conservative lawyer who represented Trump in his first impeachment trial. In Wisconsin, Stein’s campaign was represented by Michael Dean, a conservative lawyer who regularly works with Republicans. Her campaign has also hired Accelevate, a political consulting group that’s previously worked with Republicans.
“Kamala Harris deserves to lose 1,000 times over,” Sawant said
Sawant, a leftist force on the City Council for a decade, admitted the obvious — that Stein has no chance to win.
Sawant called the state “ground zero to punish Kamala Harris and defeat her.”
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/at-seattle-rally-sawant-says-harris-deserves-to-lose-1000-times/
Fuck Rich and his ridiculous take – fuck Sawant
@50: “[International courts] haven’t ended a single conflict with a ruling or saved a single-life.”
lol, international court rulings have ended dozens and dozens of conflicts. The ICJ even publishes an index of “contentious cases,” apparently to refute poorly-read internet lawyers who think the court’s work has no real-world impact 😄:
https://www.icj-cij.org/contentious-cases
@50: “even South Africa appears to have thrown up their hands and sent their lawyers home.”
Ha ha, no. In reality, more and more other countries keep joining South Africa’s suit.
@55, None of those rulings ended a war where non-combatants were getting killed. So not a single life saved. No war crimes stopped with the stroke of a pen.
It lists a bunch of rulings where the parties had decided the cost of a war was higher than the outcome they could get from a negotiated or arbitratred settlement.
Wars happen when a party, or parties, want an outcome unobtainable by negotiation or arbitration and the cost of a war, and the risk of lossing one, is worth the potential prize.
International Courts have not saved a single noncombat life by ruling a war unlawful, or that means undertaken in the war was unlawful.
That is the case here. Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Israel all want something that the other party won’t agree to, and won’t accept an arbitrated outcome that gives the other party what they want.
@55: Ha ha, next time consider spending more than an hour reading a few of these multi-hundred-page before you opine on their contents!
In “Armed Activities on the Territory of the Congo,” Uganda paused its military deployments to Congo in response to the ICJ’s preliminary measures, later withdraw its forces altogether, entered negotiations with Congo over reparations at the order of the ICJ, and has now begun to pay reparations. This is in the context of the Second Congo War, which killed over 5 million people, so knocking out one of the major belligerents is no small accomplishment in terms of saving human lives.
I’m not sure where you got this notion that international courts don’t save lives, but that notion is not based on any reading of the courts’ orders and judgments nor on any familiarity with military history. You’re like the mirror-image of Average Bob with this stuff, lol! 😄
@41 In 2020–the last presidential year–Ann Davison was featured in a nationwide campaign as a disaffected Democrat so fed up with her party that she became a Repugnican. So, yes, Davison essentially did what Sawant is doing now: trying to influence folks to vote for Dumbp.
@57 — and if The Stranger had written article after article about how Ann Davison was awesome and anyone who criticized her for any reason was terrible, then we’d be just as critical of them for rabbit-holing her heel turn like they have with Sawant. Davison is a one term fluke who lucked into her seat because of the toxicity of her opponent. Sawant is who The Stranger has said repeatedly all other candidates for office should model. So now that it’s clear that Sawant is a huge liar and would prefer Trump — which would be devastating to all of the policies she has pretended to care about for all these years — it’s entirely appropriate to point out her hypocrisy and privilege. But The Stranger won’t do that.
The fact that The Stranger is deflecting rather than criticizing Sawant shows that they too would prefer Trump. It’s utterly disqualifying and offensive to all of those who have stood steadfast against Trump for the last 8 years in the face of his degeneracy. Sawant should be ashamed, and so too should The Stranger.
I love how the the chorus here rail about the most ineffectual politician ever and in the same paragraph discuss how she is about to destroy democracy in the USA (re: sawant). What is it, is she a fellow traveler or a evil genius?
Old Lady 1: ‘The food here is so awful’.
Old Lady 2: ‘Yes, and the portions are too small.’
AIPAC: their job is to lobby for Israel. Do they control Washington? Not really. Does money? Yes. Does AIPAC have and use money? Follow it. Can’t blame them any more than one would blame Putin for using social media against low information US voters. It’s a feature of the system.
@57: Citation needed.
Even if Davison did what you said, she was a private citizen when she did it, and if it was a national campaign, she may or may not have mentioned Trump.
By contrast, Sawant trades upon her reputation as a Seattle City Council Member, goes to a swing state, and openly works to defeat VP Harris, knowing only Trump can benefit. And the only response from the Stranger is to tell everyone to shut up about it.
Enjoy your status as a Sawant supporter.
@59: There’s no conflict between noting CM Sawant’s thin record of accomplishment in Seattle (residential rent control, saving the Showbox), and criticizing her effort to get Trump elected.
She was a failure at advancing the agenda she claimed to support, and she’s now actively working against that agenda — and the agenda of any decent citizen, as well — without a peep of protest from the Stranger, the Stranger’s supportive commenters, or anyone else who ever told us voters in Seattle about how great she was.
All we — her supporters and her critics — can do now is hope she’s as useless in getting Trump elected as she was in advancing her agenda in Seattle.
@60 Actually Ann Davison was running for Lt. Governor at the time as a Republican. This followed her failed race for city council as a Dem.
This is one link I found about Davison trying to encourage Dems to become Repugs:
https://shiftwa.org/its-time-for-me-to-leave-the-democratic-party/
There was a 2020 YouTube interview with a some despicable neanderthal which I can’t locate. Trust me, Davison was all in on Dumbp. Probably still is. The Stranger should ask her who she’s voting for in 2024.
Sorry, my 62 comment was in answer to 58, not 60.
Of course the MAGAts want people to believe that “they” control the weather. We all know who “they” are, and our current crop of rightwingers would much rather “deal with” the Jews than actually do anything about fossil fuel consumption.
@62: Shift WA is the best you’ve got? Srsly?
So, Davison was not part of a national campaign, she wasn’t an office-holder or ex-office-holder at the time she mouthed off to tiny little irrelevant Shift WA, and voting for Trump in WA won’t do anything to get him elected President. Other than that, you’re spot-on with your analogy to Sawant, who stated flatly she’s doing this to “punish” Harris, and to deny Harris the Oval Office. (Sisterhood, powerful, etc.)
Best of all, hating on local Democrats was Sawant’s stock-in-trade for over ten years, and suddenly when Davison did it, THEN you had a problem with it? Priceless.
@65 As I said, there was also a YouTube interview back in 2020 with some nationally known crazy Trumpist that I can’t locate.
I suppose that I’m just baffled by all the hullabaloo over Sawant campaigning against the Dems. We’ve always known she’s not a Democrat; she’s an ardent DSA. DSA folks hate Dems. She campaigned against Hillary in 2016 and we re-elected her once after that and we saved her from recall another time. Yet everyone acts “shocked,” Casablanca-style! It’s kind of funny.
I voted for Clinton, Biden and will happily vote for Kamala, but Sawant is entitled to her crazy antics. If Harris loses, it won’t be because of Sawant. It will be because of recent inflation. But I’d still like to know if our “law and order” city attorney is going to vote for the felon! Aren’t you the least bit curious?
@66: “I suppose that I’m just baffled by all the hullabaloo over Sawant campaigning against the Dems.”
You really just can’t understand the difference between campaigning “against the Dems” in Seattle, where the choice is Dems or Socialists, and her campaigning now in Michigan, where the choice is between a Democratic or Republican PRESIDENT? Trump could destroy everything Sawant and Seattle ever claimed to care about, but this seems not to bother you in the slightest. I guess you’re so habituated to swallowing her lies, her now telling you she never really cared about anything you voted for also doesn’t bother you in the least.
“She campaigned against Hillary in 2016…”
And her supporters have lied about that ever since, doggedly sticking to the fiction Stein had a chance.
“If Harris loses, it won’t be because of Sawant.”
Nope, not in your world. Even if Harris loses Michigan to Trump by one vote, and then a dozen voters come forward to say Sawant convinced them to vote for Stein instead of Harris, you will still insist Sawant had nothing to do with Trump II: Revenge Boogaloo.
I think it’s great Sawant’s supporters are now arguing that she’s completely ineffectual at her chosen political mission. We her critics spent most of a decade telling you that, but you wouldn’t listen when it mattered. I happily accept your final vindication of our criticism of her, though.
‘But I’d still like to know if our “law and order” city attorney is going to vote for the felon!’
Because when you can’t defend your champion, and you know it, you attack someone else. (Why, it’s almost like you believe no one has ever tried that before…)
“Aren’t you the least bit curious?”
One vote in the state of Washington will have absolutely no effect on the US Presidential race. So no, I couldn’t possibly care less how Davison votes. I have no doubt you’ll be desperately trying to make everyone else care, though, should Sawant take a loud victory lap for Trump II.
@67 Yeah, you still don’t seem to understand Sawant after all these years. She is a Trotskyist and would like to bring down the U.S. “capitalist regime.” She’s never lied about that or claimed to be a “normie” Democrat. She wants Harris to lose because she sees obviously this as a step toward the eventual overthrow of capitalism with the chaos Dumbp would unleash. Your appeals for her to stop campaigning in Michigan are bootless. I’m not quite sure what you arguing…? None of us here can convince her and it’s her right to campaign anywhere she wants to. Free speech, mind you.
I repeat: if Michigan votes for Dumbp, “it’s the economy, stupid.” These presidential elections are always about the state of the economy, in the end. It’s Harris’s biggest weakness–and it’s not even Kamala’s fault.
By the way, we should be happy that Sawant is only urging a third party vote and not encouraging disaffected folks to directly vote for Dumbp. That would really hurt Kamala.
But, yeah, I definitely want to know how Ann Davison votes. If she is voting for Kamala or third party, I will have respect for her. Some of my favorite folks these days are Never Trump Republicans.
@68: I understand perfectly well, and have for years; Socialist Alternative is a Trotskyist cult. Here’s what they have to say about her campaigning for Trump:
‘Trump winning is not punishment for the Democrats, it’s punishment for millions of working and oppressed people in the US and around the world. It would be nothing to celebrate, just as a continuation of the full support by Biden/Harris for Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza is nothing to celebrate. We should also be clear that both parties are united in their drive towards a wider conflict between US and Chinese imperialism.
‘Socialist Alternative wholly disagrees with Sawant’s new approach, and given her past affiliation with our organization, we feel the need to clarify this. We are strong opponents of the Democrats, but it is genuinely shocking to hear that Sawant thinks it would be a “historic” victory for Kamala Harris to lose this election to Trump.’ (https://www.socialistalternative.org/2024/10/14/the-case-for-voting-jill-stein-in-the-trump-era/)
See? Free speech, used to describe exactly what is wrong with Sawant campaigning for Trump. Somehow, they found a way to criticize her, while you still haven’t. That’s the issue here, your refusal to use your free speech to criticize her for trying to inflict Trump upon the world, yet again.
‘I repeat: if Michigan votes for Dumbp, “it’s the economy, stupid.”‘
And I repeat: you’ll simply reject any and all evidence showing Sawant had a decisive effect. Again, thank you for validating criticism of Sawant as utterly ineffective at accomplishing her stated political goals.
“By the way, we should be happy that Sawant is only urging a third party vote and not encouraging disaffected folks to directly vote for Dumbp.”
I love how you flipped immediately from claiming Sawant will have no real effect, to claiming she could easily convince persons who might vote for Harris to vote for Trump. (How, exactly, would Sawant convince Democratic-leaning voters to go for Trump instead — by recounting her own long history of ceaseless hatred for the Democrats?)
“But, yeah, I definitely want to know how Ann Davison votes.”
Then I suggest you ask her. I somehow doubt posting your interest in a forum she likely never reads will get you anywhere.
@69 I do disagree with Sawant on this, but so what? There is no politician with whom I agree on everything. Were I an elected official, I know that I wouldn’t agree with my own positions 100% of the time!
What I recall about third parties from the one political science class I took years ago is that folks who vote for them probably would not have voted. It is incorrect to assume that people who vote Green would probably vote for the Democrat if they didn’t have the Green option. Their votes “don’t count,” but they prefer that to the binary choice. That’s fine. Stupid, but fine. Much more dangerous to Harris than Sawant–an out-of-town character–is the Muslim Democratic mayor of the Muslim majority Michigan city of Hamtramck who endorsed Dumbp and urged his fellow citizens and Muslims to vote for Dumbp, not Jill Stein. You deny it but, mathematically, direct votes for Dumbp are far more a threat to a Harris victory than third party votes.
@70: Sawant has explicitly said Stein cannot win, and Sawant’s stated purpose in going to Michigan is to deny Harris the presidency, to “punish” her. Sawant is therefore campaigning for Trump. She’s using her status as a former Council Member in Seattle — an office you kept her in for as long as possible — as credibility for her effort. That’s her thanks to you for your keeping her in office, and you don’t even have the self-respect to get offended.
I see your pre-emptive reasons for Sawant not being responsible for a possible Trump victory continue to expand. Now it’s another local elected official. Yes, that could contribute to Trump’s election as well, but the point here is Sawant doing it. Trump will do everything he can to destroy everything she ever claimed to support, and Sawant’s helping him to realize this destruction. Again, your lack of caring simply astounds. Why did you even bother to vote for her in the first place?
Wow, around in circles we go! I’ve addressed all these matters. Take care!
@72: “I’ve addressed all these matters.”
Except, of course, why Sawant campaigning for Trump doesn’t bother you in the slightest.