After days of real rain, the real wind came and annihilated many trees and cut power for an estimated 300,000 humans in the water-clogged region. “O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,” howled wind gusts that, in some parts, reached 112 mph. This morning, Seattle’s sky is almost calm and few of the brightest stars are visible. As for the rest of the day, expect some showers, strong and cold breezes, and a high of 47.
The Washington floods death toll is now 1. It happened in Snohomish not long after Tuesday completed its first hour. A 33-year-old man, whose state of mind (sober or not) is unknown at this point, drove past signs that clearly told drivers to turn right back and make other plans. Soon after the young man made his last and very bad decision, he plunged into a ditch filled with "six feet of water." When rescuers retrieved him from the submerged car, he was no longer among the living.
I moved to this part of America 30 years ago to avoid real weather. Yes it rained here, but rarely heavily. Yes it got cold here, but nothing like Detroit or Chicago cold. It was just perfect for me. Now look at what anthropogenic climate change has done to my little paradise. We get weather in the summer (too many hot days) and weather in the winter (rain that doesn’t fuck around).
A second Pacific cold front will cross the Pacific Northwest Wednesday followed by another atmospheric river event. These will mean additional periods of gusty winds, mountain snow, and heavy to excessive rainfall with a renewed flooding threat. Make sure to check weather.gov for the latest.
— National Weather Service (@nws.noaa.gov) December 16, 2025 at 7:59 AM
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Real talk: Rain or no rain, Metro's 60 bus is going to be late leaving Capitol Hill. In fact, though not as bad as the 8 (the bus that knows only its own time), it's less dependable than the Seattle Streetcar, which, despite being stuck on tracks that are not separated from traffic-generating cars, still manages to meet much of its schedule. The 60 is such a mystery to me.
The replica of a Bavarian village called Leavenworth is asking the Lord of Lords and King of Kings (mother nature) why the floods had to happen now, during the one time of the year its economy, which is centered around Christmastown, gets a good blast of much-needed tourist cash. First, the snow doesn’t fall like it used to. It’s been replaced by rain. Then came the floods, which closed the town’s lifeline (US Route 2) for five whole Christmastime days. The mayor of Leavenworth, Carl Florea, said to KIRO Newsradio: “[The holiday season is] really important for our retail establishments, it’s when people do a lot of their buying, a lot of their shopping, and a lot of that we’re dependent on. Our economy is a tourism economy.”
Speaking of the Christmas economy: Artificial Christmas trees, which are popular and mostly made in “the factory of the world,” China, are now demanding more cash from cash-strapped American consumers because of, yes, Trump’s tariffs. And it’s not just the trees; it’s also the decorations. Spectrum News: “The US Census Bureau estimates that nearly $3 billion in Christmas decorations are imported annually from China.”
But what do these Nordic trees have to do with the birth of Jesus anyway? Well, Christianity appropriated them from a bunch of German heathens (Leavenworth’s dark secret). Now is a good time for a little and relevant detour into European history. During the period, the early Middle Ages, that saw the replacement of tree-worship (arborolatry) with monotheism in Germany, a popular method of converting German pagans to Christianity was to chop down their sacred trees. In Willibald’s Life Of St Boniface—an account of the Anglo-Saxon missionary, Boniface, who killed his earthy Germanic name and adopted a dead Latin one—you will find this description of his felling of a huge pagan tree, The Oak of Thunor, in AD 723:
"Taking his courage in his hands (for a great crowd of pagans stood by watching and bitterly cursing in their hearts the enemy of the gods), [Boniface] cut the first notch. But when he had made a superficial cut, suddenly, the oak’s vast bulk, shaken by a mighty blast of wind from above crashed to the ground, shivering its topmost branches into fragments in its fall. As if by the express will of God… the oak burst asunder into four parts, each part having a trunk of equal length. At the sight of this extraordinary spectacle the heathens who had been cursing ceased to revile and began, on the contrary, to believe and bless the Lord." Boniface did not stop with just cutting down the tree; he used the dead oak to build a chapel, which he dedicated to Saint Peter.
This primitive business of worshiping trees was eventually Christianized, and entered British and American culture in the 19th century by way of Prince Albert, the German prince who married Queen Victoria.
Fine, now back to the regular economy: The Bureau of Labor Statistics finally released jobs data after two months of nothing doing. And what did it come down to? The Trump economy is losing more jobs than it's creating. October saw 105,000 jobs go up in smoke; November saw 64,000 jobs reappear. And unemployment ticked up to 4.6%, its highest level since 2021. So, these are not, after all, the golden years, the golden years.
When the American economy tanks, the first to go under are always Black people. This fact was, of course, confirmed in the jobs data released on Tuesday, which said that the unemployment rate for Black people hit 8.3 percent in November. It hasn't been this high since 2021. And it will, at this pace, only get higher. Black folks have been here before and they will be here again because, in the words of that 80s hit tune, "somethings just never change."
oh look a real unemployment problem
— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) December 16, 2025 at 12:28 PM
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The GOP has wasted our time again. It has no real plan to improve the health care system. It only wants to take money from those who don’t have it and give it to those who have way too much of it. There’s nothing much else to see in their politics than that. But the health care issue is proving to be dangerous at a time when the economy is unraveling and Trump is growing more and more unpopular. And so, some moderate Republicans have decided that political survival is the order of the day and joined Democrats to require a vote on extending health care credits for three more years. First Indianapolis, and now this! Trump must be livid. The vote, however, won’t come until January, after the ACA subsidies have expired.
Let’s close AM with a broken heart in the rain:
