Less than 25% is not much of a reduction of ICE agents.

With the death of snowpack in the West, Seattle should repurpose a ski area's gondola, installing one station at the Capitol Hill light rail station and the other at the Seattle Center.

There are other circular Metro bus routes(e.g. the #48) aside from the #8.
The problem with the #8 is that going east to west in Seattle had always been a pain in the ass. The major intersections every 3 blocks guarantee a slow ride (on Denny, 45th, 50th…). The only real fix would be getting public transit completely separated from the traffic light grid. We are still paying the price for voting down separated transit 50 years ago.

Despite what we may hear in our media filter bubbles, and notwithstanding several recent controversies, recent deportations remain broadly favored by Americans:

“In a WSJ poll taken after Good’s killing, voters said that the Republican Party was ‘better equipped’ to handle immigration than the Democrats by an 11-point margin. Apparently, the only thing more unpopular than a nakedly authoritarian immigration policy is a Democratic one.”

And:

“61 percent of midterm voters want deportations to continue,” per a Cygnal poll.

It was an unbelievably cruel policy by the Biden administration to allow millions of people into the country and mislead them into thinking that if they simply claimed asylum, they would be allowed to stay. Most Americans would inevitably reject such a policy, which made extensive deportations by the next administration inevitable. It undoubtedly ushered Trump back into the White House on what should have been an easy defeat. Democrats will have no choice but to moderate on immigration if they want even a slim chance of retaking the presidency in 2028.

one of your Best, Charles
in this, an existential threat
to our democracy and humanity.

fucking Bravissimo.

"Democrats
will have no choice
but to moderate on immigration if
they want even a slim chance of retaking the presidency in 2028."

nekrasova on February 4, 2026 at 10:30 AM

oh, please, nekky:
Bonespurs has Zero
Intention of relinquishing
Power, by even allowing us to
fucking VOTE in November -- thedjt's
gonna have his armed ICEStapo surrounding

every polling station in America.

Haven't you Read the fucking "News?

And -- there will BE NO MORE
MAIL-IN VOTING -- IF we
Still even HAVE a USPS

@4, the problems I have with the present enforcement are the willingness of ICE to not only detain US citizens, even if they show proof, e.g., the Kavanaugh stop, but it is breaking and entering into homes without a judicial warrant. Stop violating constitutional rights and stop f*cking with legal citizens and it's all good.

"Pollution is a form of ownership, a form of property...(“I can trash this, therefore it's mine”)"

Is this why our unhoused neighbors trash public parks and other areas?

8.30am ET Zoom webinar? I hope all their staff are based somewhere that uses ET, because I wouldn't be getting up at 5.30am PT to hear I just got laid off.

Again I write, the French had a delightful solution to the problem of the evil & entitled rich all the way back in 1789. Try it, you'll like it!

@4 Ohhh, a Cygnal poll! Sounds legit.

@8: The point Charles desperately tries to avoid is that pollution is socialism of cost. By dumping, say, exhaust gasses from my automobile into air everyone breathes, I avoid paying the full cost of operating my automobile, spreading the cost of pollution to everyone worldwide. Charles cannot stand to have his pure-good word, “socialism,” polluted (heh) by badness, so he constructs a bizarre alternate reality, in which pollution (something that, by definition, no one wants) becomes capitalist property. And he knows that is evil, so he feels better.

You shouldn't trash a film you haven't seen Charles, especially an Oscar contender.

@4 Not so much. At least not if you don't use cherry-picked polls by Republican pollsters.

Recent national polls asking if ICE has gone too far/is being too forceful/is too tough:
NYT/Siena: 61% yes
WSJ: 56% yes
Searchlight: 58% yes
Fox: 59% yes
CBS: 61% yes
YouGov: 58% yes

ICE's tactics are wildly unpopular with pretty much everyone outside the MAGA base.

Source including links to polls: https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2026/Items/Feb04-2.html

@11: It had its problems. The blade didn't always slice through so they had to take out a gun to finish the job. Not to mention that heads would miss the bucket and roll off the platform and was a very bloody mess.

16.
with
His bloody
luck, c. Bonespurs's
likely roll into an awaiting
Belljar to be whisked Away to

MAGA Central
where it'll be fastened
to Tubes and hooked up to
the Innernet where he'll 'live' for fucking

ever to Rule the Universe from Malatardo
under 30' of toxic saltwater
and sewage.

"I’m not against Mayor Katie Wilson’s ..."

Clarity at last in the narrative.

@15 ICE roughness is a separate polling question issue than the one I raised - remember to read more closely next time.

@12 Yes, they're frequently cited by The New York Times, who have also highlighted them as the most accurate pollster in certain cycles like final-week polls. I'd advise, instead of going off what "sounds legit", just avoiding commenting when you have no idea what you're talking about.

@11 : And they ended up living under the reign of Emperor Napoleon a few years later as a direct consequence. So it may not have been as effective at ending oppression as one would hope.

@11
Extreme measures are often countered with extreme reactions. It did not go well for Robespierre.

"CNN reports that the Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, ... laid off a third of its newsroom."

The Stranger does not attract enough eyeballs with its narrative to paying ads next to the narrative. The revenue does not cover the payroll needed to produce the narrative.

Bold Type Tickets and Everout are profitable.

How much longer will Noisy Creek cover The Stranger's narrative losses before they get smart and realize that Bold Type Tickets and Everout will spin off more cash without the drag on cash to pay Charles, Vivian, Hannah, et. al.?

Why not put The Stranger behind a paywall so readers have to value the narrative with money to see it and comment on it?

If The Stranger is such a valuable contribution and influence on local civic life and politics, why aren't people willing to pay for the cost of producing that narrative with subscriptions? Likewise with WaPo and all the other print journalism that is dropping like flies.

How we vote with discretionary spending says more about what humans value more than any poll or expressed opinion. Our discretionary cash speaks more loudly about what we value than any other measure, short of what we give up life itself for to preserve.

@13. Exactly! Worse, he has to be delusional in regards to the environmental legacy of those hallowed socialist polities. When the Soviet Union fell, so did the curtain hiding the near apocalyptic state of its environment. Or the barely breathable air above Hanoi, Havana, Beijing. Ha Long Bay, UNESCO site and floating garbage dump. The vanished Aral Sea. Endless examples.

What binds it all together is that systems that fully embrace command economies tend to ignore externalities in pursuit of production targets while repressing civil society that would press for environmental reform.

Can we crowd fund a field trip for Charles? How bout sending him to Sebes Romania and let him showcase the pristine environmental wonderland that it is most certainly not.

@8 ""Pollution is a form of ownership, a form of property...(“I can trash this, therefore it's mine”)"
Is this why our unhoused neighbors trash public parks and other areas?"

Actually yes it is. I'm sure that was very much part of the mindset of those at the Woodland Park encampment who chopped down the trees, or of those who tore apart Ballard Commons.

It's kind of the economic equivalent of "Your not the boss of me!"

@11 "Again I write, the French had a delightful solution to the problem of the evil & entitled rich all the way back in 1789. Try it, you'll like it!"

Are you referring to the solution that ended up with a river of blood running through Place de la Concorde as thousands of people were executed for wearing the wrong hat?

The solution that resulted in a narcissistic dictator declaring war on all of Europe, resulting in a devastating defeat for France.

Are you referring to the solution that resulted in a quarter century long bloodbath that ended with the restoration of the fucking Monarchy!

Is that the solution you desire?

Be careful what you wish for Robespierre.

@19 Well, Cygnal certainly wants to sell me Glenn Beck's book, so they must be legit. Anyhow, your data point is fucking stupid. "Wants deportations to continue" is so broad that it borders on meaningless. Frankly 61% seems low.

@2, Not a bad idea.

How about from the top of Queen Anne Hill to downtown with a stops in Lower Queen Anne and Belltown?

Capitol Hill to SLU? Capitol Hill to Downtown? First Hill to Downtown?

They would be faster than a the street cars, existing and proposed, stuck in traffic and cheap to operate since each vehicle does not require an operator.

@26 their president and founder is a talking head on newsmax lol

A necessary read for gay men and lesbian women:

The Erasure of Same-Sex Attraction: How Trans/Queer Activism Betrays Gays and Lesbians Alike
https://x.com/5280BasedHomo/status/2019071893744095236?s=20

@8 “I can trash this, therefore it's mine.”

Possibly? It may better describe the output of some of those posting here.

LouChe @30, I've described these Slog AM comment threads as the virtual equivalent of a wall that has been thoroughly defaced by taggers. But a trashed homeless encampment where the campers have fully settled in? I think that works too. (And I say this without trying to pass any sort of judgment on our unhoused neighbors.)

BTW, I haven't seen our manic police blotter poster lately. Perhaps I should not draw attention to this observation. (You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone.)

Here is a blog post about ridership on the Metro 8: https://seattletransitblog.com/2024/11/19/ridership-patterns-for-king-county-metro-route-8/. The charts may be hard to read and even tougher to summarize but I'll try. Think of a bus that starts in Uptown (otherwise known as Lower Queen Anne). It picks up a lot of riders on Queen Anne Avenue, especially at that first stop. Then it turns onto Westlake and continues to pick up a lot of riders. At Westlake & Denny it picks up the most riders going that direction (over 500 a day). By now a lot of people are getting off the bus as well. This continues as the bus makes its way up the hill (to Olive & Summit). At Broadway & John (next to the Capitol Hill Station) you have the most action. A lot of people getting on and off the bus. After that, there is a significant decrease in the number of riders getting on the bus. But there are still a lot of people getting off the bus after that. About 1,000 riders. It is evenly split, with about half of those riders using the stops east of 15th.

The point being that the high-ridership section is between Uptown and MLK & Madison. This is also where it makes sense to alter the route, given the geography. The bus makes a sharp turn there. It then runs on MLK, even though MLK is very close to 23rd at that point (where there is another bus -- the 48). This is less than ideal. Riders are left wondering which street to walk to -- it would be better to have one bus running more often (on 23rd). There are several options, many of which have been discussed on the Seattle Transit Blog, including:

1) Keeping the same basic pattern but following 23rd instead. A lot of the riders on 23rd are just following the corridor south of John. They would take either bus, reducing their wait time. Riders going north to the UW could just take the 8 and transfer to Link as well (which means either bus works that direction). The drawback is that you couldn't increase frequency without spending more money. In contrast, you could run the bus more often if you:

2) Combine the 8 with the 11. This means the bus would run from Madison Park to Uptown. This would save a considerable amount of service which could go into running the bus more often. There is a bit of a service mismatch there though. Madison Park will never get the kind of ridership you find for the rest of the route. This leads to...

3) Branch the route at MLK & Madison. One section would go to Madison Park. The other would go on MLK. If the bus ran every fifteen minutes at each end it would run every 7.5 minutes along the core section. This would match the frequency of the 3/4.

There are advantages and disadvantages to each approach. The first retains a lot of the same functionality while improving the 23rd corridor (south of John). The second would lead to better frequency for the network. The third approach retains coverage for MLK. This is a classic ridership/coverage trade-off: https://humantransit.org/2018/02/basics-the-ridership-coverage-tradeoff.html.

Note: Jason Li, who was instrumental in getting bus lanes for Denny wrote a three part series about the 8. This is the third part, where he discusses some routing options: https://seattletransitblog.com/2025/06/26/fix-the-l8-long-w8s/. I wrote this proposal, focusing on improving frequency (it has the 8/11 combination): https://seattletransitblog.com/2023/08/30/high-frequency-network-surrounding-rapidride-g/

"It was an unbelievably cruel policy by the Biden administration to allow millions of people into the country and mislead them into thinking that if they simply claimed asylum, they would be allowed to stay."

No, that was the Statue of Liberty.

@2 The gondola idea was proposed in 2012: http://citytank.org/2012/02/21/a-gondola-with-a-cherry-on-top/ and about a year ago by a different author: https://seattletransitblog.com/2025/03/17/slu-to-capitol-hill-gondola/.

@3 A lot of people suggested a "Metro 8" subway. It could include First Hill or more of the Central Area (it depends on how you take the turn). Even more people support a subway line from Ballard to the UW. The big advantage there is the improvement in the network. As you point out, the buses can go pretty fast north-south but they are slow east-west. Thus unlike a lot of Link proposals, an east-west subway line would be faster than driving, at noon. This makes trips involving a transfer (e. g. south on Aurora, east to the UW) much more attractive. These two ideas were combined in this proposal: https://www.theurbanist.org/2016/01/11/ballard-spur-and-metro-8-subway-serve-seattle-better-than-interbay-light-rail/

@33, What is lacking is ANY national consensus on who we should allow to immigrate, not for the benefit of the immigrant, but for the benefit of the nation. What skills do we need that we can't or won't generate domestically, in the quantities desired? What jobs do we want immigrants to do instead of Americans because Americans don't want to do them? How long can these people stay? Do they get a pathway to citizenship (likely meaning the leave the field where we have labor shortages)? Are we allowing immigration in certain circumstances to attract foreign investment (E.g. Someone of means investing in certain sectors of our economy, such as economically distressed areas, as a condition of immigration)? What numbers of each type of immigrant visa does that lead to? Those are the discussions nobody is having in Congress, or at the grass roots voter level.

One thing I insist on seeing with H1B and H2B workers, is that they be given a visa for a sector of classification of work and working in that sector, rather than it being tied to a particular employer. It's exploitive for Amazon, Microsoft, or a particular packing house in Central Washington, to be able to cancel their visa by firing them. It leads to, "Program for 90 hours a week, or else," demands, or "Pack this many boxes of fruit per hour, or else ..." It has a spillover effect to U.S. Citizens. I.e. "If you won't program for 60 hours a week, we can get a H1B worker that will go 90 hours a week to replace you," or at the performance review, "Your output is not as great as Mr. Sing, Wong, etc., because they are so much more dedicated to being in the office than you, so no step-raise for you."

The H1B and H2B visa holders need to be able to say, "I am taking a job doing the same thing at your competitor, at the same rate, because they have offered better work life balance," or say, "I am taking the job at your competitors packing house, because the rate required won't put me at risk of losing my arm ..." If they are free to leave, without losing their visa, provided they do the work permitted by the visa for another employer, the exploitation potential is much lower.

Thanks for @32. Informative.

@19 Oookay, another round with the big hammer of facts. Your claim in @4 is that deportations remain popular with Americans.

From the CBS poll (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ice-trump-greenland-trump-poll/):
54% disapprove of Trump's program to deport immigrants illegally in the US
53% think ICE operations in the US should be decreased

From the Fox poll (https://www.foxnews.com/politics/fox-news-poll-59-voters-say-ice-too-aggressive-up-10-points-since-july):
59% think that ICE deportation efforts are too aggressive

From the USA Today poll (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2026/01/18/trump-wsj-poll-immigration-agents/88245119007/):
54% of Americans think that the effort to deport illegal immigrants has gone too far.

Americans may in theory like the idea of deporting illegal immigrants when asked about that in a vacuum. I'm sure the Cygnal poll's questions were carefully designed to get that result. However, a solid majority don't like what that looks like in practice. That's clearly shown in the CBS poll, where the question is about Trump's deportation program, not any particular ICE tactics.

The press release for the cygnal immigration poll reads like it was written by stephen miller. They don’t even try to sound non-partisan.

https://www.cygn.al/news/national-poll-deportation-ice-overwhelmingly-supported-by-voters-and-democrats-pay-a-political-price-on-the-issue-especially-over-a-shutdown-pr/

Ah, nice memories of walking up the Denny hill each day and beating the 8 bus to Capitol Hill in traffic.

@37 Yeah, they’re not polling, they’re testing talking points for Republican candidates. Which is fine, but it’s not a good faith poll.

@23: "What binds it all together is that systems that fully embrace command economies tend to ignore externalities in pursuit of production targets while repressing civil society that would press for environmental reform."

While that's all true, we can get there too, via the same conflict-of-interest route. In that system, the persons responsible for filling the factory orders also had responsibility to enforce the environmental laws. (Those persons just didn't have the profit motive for filling their factory orders.) Republican administrations in the US routinely appoint as many polluter-friendly regulators as they possibly can, to lessen enforcement of the enviromental laws, which, like their long-gone Bolshevik counterparts, they find so very, very inconvenient. But the lack of profit motive in the Bolshevik case makes it fall completely outside of the range of thought acceptable to Charles, and so he has to accept a fantasy world of circular logic, where evil capitalist property-owners pollute simply because capitalism and property-ownership are just so incredibly inherently evil.

Also, Charles dropped a big clue into the middle of his fantasy 'explanation,' when he described it as, "...one of the most original economic concepts conceived by a thinker who wasn't a Marxist." I initially believed this as just another manifestation of Charles' usual small-minded bigotry on the topic of economics, but it was such a jejune swipe in the midst of Earnestly Serious Adult Writing, I figured it might originate in more than mere snottiness. Sure enough, looking up the origin of "pollution as socialized cost," quickly led straight back to the British economist of the early 20th Century, Arthur Pigou, who proposed a government tax upon pollution. Therefore, I speculatively identify Pigou as the unacceptably not-Marxist economist whose concept trumped (ha!) Charles' 'explanation.'

@2, @38: While I don't know about the gondola idea, when I lived on Capitol Hill and worked in the industrial district of Blah-ville, the first inbound downtown bus stop from the 'burbs was on Stewart, at Denny. If the Ol' No. 8 happened to arrive at that tiny triangle of sidewalk when I did, then I'd take it for the swift trip UP to B'way & John. It felt less like settling into a gondola, and more like hopping aboard an express elevator (especially as I usually had to stand). On extra double bonus trip days, if the bus had to stop at B'way for the light, the driver would let us all out on the west side of the intersection with John, saving me no small amount of time, as I lived somewhat west and south of that intersection.

"This cosmological metaphor is reinforced by the good number of world-famous physicists who were attracted to Epstein."

It could make for a really great linguistic metaphor as well:

"Newly released emails show Noam Chomsky... commiserated with Epstein about his legal troubles and bad press"

(https://www.wsj.com/us-news/ignore-it-how-the-elite-consoled-jeffrey-epstein-over-his-crimes-3cb0e7d0?mod=hp_lead_pos9)