Final day of warm weather: Morning! Today’s temperature should climb to about 66 degrees, and the National Weather Service expects today will be our last 60-degree day this March. But before you groan,  Charles makes a very good point that this freakish warm weather should bum everyone out. We should be wishing for gloomy, almost freezing March days. Revel in the return of the drizzle this week and shun the sun.

Cure your ballots: The presidential primary ballot in Washington requires every voter select their party affiliation, an extra step that some people forgot to do. To make sure your vote counts, Hannah tells you how to cure your ballot before the deadline on Thursday, March 21. So go pick your party! It could mean the difference between sending President Joe Biden a bunch of delegates or sending him a message with a few uncommitted delegates. Unfortunately, if you do pick Democrat on your ballot, one of those “In this household, we believe” signs will spontaneously appear in your window/yard. 

SPD Officer threatens to pull woman out of her car by her hair: During a low-level traffic stop, Officer Richard Bonesteel asked a woman to roll down her window, which she explained she couldn’t do because the battery was dead. Bonesteel then asked the woman to open her car door. When she asked why, he responded, “I’m going to talk to you. Either that or, or we can talk like this through your fucking warrant, and I’m going to break the window and pull you out by your hair,” according to a story by DivestSPD. The Office of Police Accountability said Bonesteel unnecessarily escalated the stop. DivestSPD’s reporting shows that women who have dated Bonesteel have called the cops on him. Meanwhile, the city council thinks we should pay for Bonesteel’s housing.  

Seattle Public Library reduces maximum digital holds limit: Starting today, people cannot put on hold more than 10 e-books and e-audiobooks at a time, down from 25. The library made the change because digital library books effectively run on a subscription model and have started to exponentially increase costs for our public libraries. If people already have books on hold, then they’ll stay in place, but people can’t place new holds until they’re under the new limit. Also, people can still place holds on up to 25 regular old books. However, in order for people to check out these tangible books, the City needs to actually hire librarians.

Report cops who run red lights: The Office of Police Accountability (OPA) makes it pretty easy to report cops who break traffic laws. People can make a practice of snitching on cops for bad driving by just remembering what, where, and when the incident happened. I know, our accountability system sometimes feels like a crap shoot, but, at minimum, reporting these cops creates a paper trail for us reporters to follow. Plus, who doesn’t love to snitch on cops?

Speaking of seeing someone and saying something: The Stranger has brought back its I Saw U column. It’s like Missed Connections but with people who read and know about The Stranger, aka the only people you want to connect with. The dating apps are dead. Long live I Saw U love notes.

Sasquatch-quality video of Kate Middleton surfaces: In the latest development of the “missing” future queen of England, TMZ published a video of Middleton walking with Prince William through some farm store in Windsor. However, the low quality of the video has only fueled the conspiracy flames, with people now claiming the palace has replaced Middleton with a body double. Honestly, I think Queen Elizabeth held this whole operation together with her tiny handbags and pearls. 

 

Congress does its job: Congressional leaders announced Tuesday they had agreed to a deal to keep the federal government funded through the fiscal year after negotiators reached an agreement on funding for the Department of Homeland Security. The details of the deal have yet to be released, but it’ll probably mean a lot of spending on border enforcement.

Violence continues in Haiti: As political leaders in Haiti work to create a new presidential council, which would select a new prime minister and council of ministers, violence in the country continues. Human rights advocates have asked Haiti’s neighbor, the Dominican Republic, to stop deporting people fleeing the violence back to Haiti, according to the Associated Press.

Trump civil case puts his assets at risk: A judge in New York has ordered former president Donald Trump to pay $464 million in a civil fraud case. Trump wants a private company to guarantee the fine as he continues his appeal of the court’s decision, meaning a company would promise to pay the court the hundreds of millions in fines if Trump loses his appeal. However, no company wants to do it. If Trump doesn’t pay soon, the New York Attorney General could start to seize Trump’s assets.

A funky base line: Tierra Whack’s new album, World Wide Whack, deserves a moment of your attention. Also, I’ve already memorized her Shower Song, and it’s literally the perfect wake-up-and-more song. Enjoy your Tuesday, everyone. 

 

Ashley Nerbovig is a staff writer at The Stranger covering policing, incarceration and courts. She is like other girls.

19 replies on “Slog AM: Check Your Ballots, OPA Reprimands SPD Officer Dick Bonesteel, Kate Middleton Captured in Grainy Video”

  1. Seattle’s activist left is so dumb that if a billionaire accidentally wandered into a rich-eating machine with a big button labeled “eat the rich”, they would walk past it without noticing on their way to angrily pledge their democracy vouchers to “uncommitted”, then get on the Internet to complain about how Democrats don’t eat the rich, then wonder why uncommitted didn’t beat any of the conservative city council candidates

  2. threaten to bust her window &

    pull a woman outta her

    car BY HER HAIR?*

    ‘DivestSPD’s

    reporting shows

    that women who have

    dated [Dick] Bonesteel

    have called the cops on him.’

    before

    or After

    dating this

    Po-po with his

    gratitutiously Pornstarry name?

    *say — didn’t he win the

    Officer Friendly award?

  3. Dick Bonesteel can’t be a real name, can it? I mean, parents can be oblivious when choosing names, but it’s hard to believe anyone would do that to a kid.

  4. Charles did not make a good point. Warm days in the PNW can happen in February and March, and often do, even preceding ACC’s impact. Go look at the daily high temp records for late winter in Seattle – they stretch back a hundred years.

    Or ask Charles’ bete noire, Cliff Mass.

  6. Cure your ballots:

    Yea, those ‘send Biden a message’ folks are really getting their point across: the ‘genocide’ in Gaza is such a driving issue for so many people, they have to scramble to find enough votes to maybe get a single ‘uncommitted’ delegate in the most progressive Congressional district in the state.

  7. @7: Careful, Comrade! Context is the enemy of cadre! 😉

    Yeah, the people who oppose ‘genocide,’ are so worldly well-informed and overall with-it, they all just plumb forgot to tick the DEMOCRATIC PARTY box when they passionately and sincerely voted in the, um, wait for it! — Democratic Party’s Primary.

    (At least, that is the Stranger’s sincere, desperate, and — most of all — sincerely desperate hope.)

  9. “Our library workers are right! We should be extending library hours & social programs, not cutting funding & understaffing them.

    “We must pass new progressive revenue this year that ensures corporations and the wealthiest are paying their fair share.”

    Why were you not able to secure this funding during the years you were part of a “progressive” majority on the Council?

    Having completely failed at that, perhaps, instead of raising taxes, Seattle could stop spending over $100M annually on programs which result in homeless persons dying of overdoses on Seattle’s streets, sidewalks, parks, green spaces, and near schools? Why can’t Seattle continue to obtain those exact same dismal results, but for free?

    (Finally, I would ask who the “wealthiest” are, and what “paying their fair share” actually means in dollars and suchlike, but having gotten nothing but torrents of verbal abuse in return for asking exactly what “genocide” means, I think I’ll pass.)

  10. @10 By the same logic, you should also cancel all of the programs to give hiring bonuses etc. to recruit incoming cops. Those programs haven’t been shown to be effective in actually increasing the size of the incoming class of new recruits since inception, so they should be cancelled too.

  12. @11: Are you also clinging to that two-page opinion survey of Seattle City department heads which the Stranger regards as Gospel Truth, or had you something else completely in mind when you didn’t provide a source for your claim?

    Also, if, like the Stranger, you discover actually providing a real source is just too gosh-darned difficult, you could simply explain how a program which won’t cost any money if it does not work equates exactly to a program which costs huge amounts of money to obtain a result which could be had for free.

  13. @3 Sure it can. Two cases. I had a college friend named Richard Seeman. Nickname? “Creamy”. Also, there was a family in my high school with the last name Zzyzz. The three kids freshman, sophomore, senior? “Zoey, Zelda, and Xerxes” respectively.

    Parents can be assholes.

  14. @11 except that money is not spent unless and until the city actually hires said officer so if as you say they are unable to recruit anyone that money is still sitting in the bank whereas with our local unhoused population that money is spent on a bunch of programs that do a whole lot of nothing every year.

    @10 I always love asking what is meant by “fair share” because progressives refuse (or more likely don’t know how) to answer the question. Ultimately the answer is if there isn’t enough tax revenue to justify whatever program they are cooking up this time then its because people aren’t paying their “fair share” so it moves around quite a bit.

  15. @13 Sure, I can provide a source. I mean, you didn’t in @10, but rules for thee and not for me, I guess. I’ll remember to ask you for sources to back up your claims next time. Is the Seattle Times sufficiently reliable for you?

    https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/as-seattle-police-applicants-lag-city-hall-looks-to-bureaucracy/

    “Since 2022, Seattle City Hall has signed off on more than $5 million to bolster the Seattle Police Department’s recruitment, to be spent on a marketing campaign, hiring bonuses and more.

    But more than a year later, the payoff of those dollars is hard to find.

    A slow ramp up of the ad campaign and inconclusive benefits from the incentives to new or transferring officers mean the city fielded roughly the same number of applicants last year as the year before and fewer than 2021.”

    It’s not just signing bonuses. The city spent more than a million bucks on advertising, none of which seemed to have worked since we had fewer applicants last year than the year before. So should the city cancel the program because it’s not working?

    @14 Oy. People suck. Was Zack not available for some reason?

  16. @15 Sure, the bonuses don’t get spent, but those advertising dollars have been pissed away.

    I don’t know how others would define it, but to me “fair share” would mean that high income households would pay the same or higher percentage of their total income in taxes as low-income households. Right now, the top 1% pays ~4% of their income in taxes, and the bottom 20% pays ~14%. At least Florida has helped us out–we’re only the second-most-regressive state tax system in the country. If we lived in the least regressive state (Minnesota), the top % would pay 10.5% of their income in taxes and the lowest 20% would pay ~6%.

    Source: p. 196, here: https://sfo2.digitaloceanspaces.com/itep/ITEP-Who-Pays-7th-edition.pdf

    How would you define a fair tax system?

  17. “SPD Officer threatens to pull woman out of her car by her hair”

    These are the unsung heroes of ACAB. The essence of that first ‘A.’ Sure your Derek Chauvins and Michael Slagers hog the limelight. But it’s people like this cop, out there being a bastard just to be a bastard, who really define the slogan.

  18. @17 I think to better answer your question you first need to differentiate between usage taxes (e.g. sales and excise taxes and property taxes) and income taxes (both actual income and capital gains). In the ITEP study you cite in your post the bigger driver of the tax disparity is the usage taxes where everyone is paying the same rate regardless of their income level. I believe this is completely fair and I would not advocate changing it at all. Your taxes are based on how much you are using whether it is buying goods, consuming electricity or the size of your home. To fix the disparity you noted the state/feds would have to move to a model whereby your usage tax varied based not on how much you consume but how much you earn. That is patently discriminatory and not at all equitable. It’s already been proposed in a few cases for traffic fines and utility costs so I’m sure we’ll see more of that.

    https://www.foxla.com/news/california-laws-2024-income-based-electric-bills-january-2024

    https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/02/traffic-tickets-income-adjustment-rich/621452/

    Going further into the ITEP study, it ignores things like estate and inheritance taxes, real estate transfer taxes and leasehold taxes which typically are levied against wealthier individuals and skews the results due to the over reliance on the usage taxes.

    Looking at income based taxes the high earners already pay an effective 25% on their income

    https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/18/who-pays-and-doesnt-pay-federal-income-taxes-in-the-us/

    This is often distorted by progressives when they speak about the Jeff Bezos of the world because they factor in his wealth (e.g. unrealized capital gains) to cite dumb statistics like he is paying 1%. That is false. Of course wealth taxes have been proposed to somehow rectify this and get the rich to “pay their fair share” but everywhere a wealth tax has been tried if fails miserably.

    In looking at incomes taxes nearly 40% of the population pays none at all. In fact the top 1% earn 26.3 % of all income and paid 45.8% of all federal income tax. To further equate that the top 1% paid 1 trillion in income taxes in 2021 while the bottom 90% paid $531B.

    So in looking at that, I generally think the tax code is fair. Wealthy individuals pay more in income, capital gains and inheritance taxes and everyone is treated equally for usage taxes (most of the rich pay more of these anyway because they are consuming more (i.e they have a bigger house) or are buying fancy cars etc. The tax code could definitely be simpler and improved but the notion is it widely unfair or that people aren’t paying their fair share is a progressive bullshit argument for the state/feds to suck up more money. This doesn’t even factor in the question of whether the government needs more money.

  19. @11: OK, so your source was indeed the two-page opinion survey, which contained no salary or retention data of any kind, as you back-handedly admitted when you ran away from it, @16:

    “It’s not just signing bonuses.”

    Not that such an admission will, in any way, prevent you from moving the goalposts:

    “The city spent more than a million bucks on advertising, none of which seemed to have worked since we had fewer applicants last year than the year before. So should the city cancel the program because it’s not working?”

    If you’d actually done any research at all, you’d know the shortage of law-enforcement officers is a nationwide problem, at both state and local levels:

    ‘”The recruitment and retention crisis is the number one issue I hear about from our state, Tribal, and local law enforcement partners across the country,” Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta said in a statement. The new report attributed the staffing issues in part to the COVID-19 pandemic, a changing labor market, office safety concerns and community frustration toward police.

    ‘To combat the decreased staffing levels, the report — commissioned by Attorney General Merrick Garland — suggests that police leaders should work to better understand the needs of the communities they serve while modernizing and streamlining hiring practices.’

    Anything in that report which might suggest Seattle has it worse than other places?

    ‘…the “often negative public perception of policing” has affected morale and led to higher burnout.’

    Seattle’s “defund” movement continues to pay dividends!

    (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/justice-department-police-hiring-report/#)

    @17, @20: While I admire your attempt at dialog over taxes, it’s important to remember that CM Morales doesn’t actually want one; the last quote I provided from her was the worst kind of demagogic duck-speak. She has learned absolutely nothing from her near-loss to a political nobody, which ultimately resulted in her opponent seated alongside her on the Council dais. So she just keeps repeating the empty rhetoric which has already failed her.

    While I would have preferred a clean sweep of the Council, leaving CM Morales in place gives a visible face and voice to Seattle’s failed “progressive” policies of the recent past. This will be a good thing to have, especially if the Stranger continues attempts to re-write Seattle’s recent history.

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