Me and the girls summoning the rest of the Epstein documents. Credit: STEPHANIE KEITH/GETTY

Strong January vibes: Lately, Seattle’s weather seems to be experiencing an identity (read: climate) crisis, but today things look pretty normal for January in the PNW. In the morning, expect temperatures to sit at around 45 degrees and then heat up ever so slightly to the upper 40s in the afternoon before cooling off again at around sunset. And no January day would be complete without hours of showers! Enjoy!

Out the child rapists: Last night, a federal judge unsealed dozens of pages of court documents in a case against convicted sex trafficker and alleged child rapist Jeffrey Epstein, who, if there is a god, is currently burning in hell. For weeks, the internet has waited for an Epstein “client” list that would finally expose powerful people who supported or participated in Epstein’s crimes, but so far the documents mostly reaffirmed his previously known associations. The unsealed names include former President Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Prince Andrew, former modeling agent Jean Luc Brunel, loyal Epstein legal advisor Alan Dershowitz, Michael Jackson, and magician David Copperfield. The judge will release more soon, according to the Associated Press.

Terror: Two bombs exploded near the burial site of military commander Qasem Soleimani, killing 84 people in Iran yesterday. ISIS claimed responsibility this morning. 

I will never be as unhinged as her, and I’m kinda jealous: An excerpt from GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley’s 2012 book made its rounds on Twitter yesterday. Apparently, she renamed her husband to his middle name. Some Twitter users got a good laugh out of it, some called her a sociopath, but I’m guessing that for Haley, who also goes by her middle name, it doesn’t seem like a big deal. 

Make Colorado Great Again: Trump appealed to the US Supreme Court Colorado’s decision to boot him from the Republican primary ballot. According to The Hill, the appeal sets the stage for a landmark legal battle over the interpretation of the 14th Amendment, which blocks insurrectionists from holding federal office.

RIP: Fuck, I loved this game.

Would you look at that: Developer Stream Real Estate filed plans to convert an old, empty office building in Uptown into an apartment building, creating 68 new apartments. Some technocrats have promoted office-to-apartment conversions, seeing a high rate of office building vacancy as office culture chokes on her final breath. But it’s sort of a goofy idea. With all of its challenges, turning offices to apartments won’t solve the housing crisis, but it’ll be fun to see how this experiment works out! 

Get wrecked, Burien: Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness and three unhoused plaintiffs filed a lawsuit against the City of Burien, claiming a recent camping ban amounts to “cruel punishment” against unhoused people who have nowhere else to go. My money’s on the plaintiffs, honestly. Seattle faces a similar suit, and in a partial ruling this summer the judge declared that Seattle plays it too fast and loose with their unannounced sweeps.

She said it! I just read it: For everyone discoursing on Twitter about leaving Gypsy Rose Blanchard alone after she got out of prison at the end of last month, please let me enjoy her voluntary online presence. 

HIIIIIIIIII: I had soooo much fun on Saturday seeing Drag Race royalty Alaska Thunderfuck 5000’s holiday live show, “It’s Beginning to Look A Lot Like ALASKA… A Christmas Show,” at the Neptune. I know Alaska as a dry-humored queen who won RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 2, but this show revealed a really matured version of Alaska, particularly when it came to her strong vocal performance. Queens sing on Drag Race for sure, but in a I-played-the-lead-in-every-high-school-musical-because-I-was-the-only-boy way. In this show, I literally just forgot Alaska was doing drag, even though she had a foot-tall blonde beehive. But then she would do something that reminded me she’s terminally online—parade a Jesus dummy around the stage, worship Cher, or play a slideshow of AI generated photos in a way that, no offense, felt like an Ellen Degeneres Show segment. Millennial corniness with AI aside, Alaska’s show ended up being one of my favorite holiday celebrations of the season. 

Alaska hugs he/they Jesus after singing “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” with the lyrics changed to “I love you, Jesus.” HK

On this day in music history: On Jan. 4, 2020 Miley Cyrus spent a fat $300 million to settle a case where Jamaican singer Flourgon accused her of ripping off his 1988 track “We Run Things.”

Hannah Krieg is a staff writer at The Stranger covering everything that goes down at Seattle City Hall. Importantly, she is a Libra. She is also The Stranger's resident Gen Z writer, with an affinity for...

17 replies on “Slog AM: Epstein Documents Unsealed, 84 Iranians Killed in Bombing, and Unhoused People Sue Burien”

  2. don’t give an iota of air to the idea that Mossad set off the 2-stage bombing at Suliemani’s tomb. not Israel’s MO. that’s some Sunni shit.

    unless it’s false-flag. we’ll never know one way or the other.

  3. @2 Since the news item said that ISIS claimed responsibility and no mention was made of Israel, why are you asking not to give any mention of Mossad?

  4. The suit was filed for $300 million in damages. The amount of the settlement, reached in December, is undisclosed but is certainly for far less than that amount.

  7. I’m confused. Did Nikki Haley make her husband use his middle name, or his first name? He’s W. Michael Haley, but she calls him Bill. Which would be his first name, no? Not his middle name?

  8. @5 What? The piece on the bombing reads:

    “Terror: Two bombs exploded near the burial site of military commander Qasem Soleimani, killing 84 people in Iran yesterday. ISIS claimed responsibility this morning.”

    No mention of Israel or Mossad. ISIS is stated to have claimed responsibility. In what way did Krieg imply that Israel was responsible? I don’t see any other articles on Slog relating to this, so it’s not another article. Even the linked Reuters article says it was claimed by the Islamic State and the US and Israel said they weren’t involved.

  9. The 9th circuit ruled last fall that unhoused individuals who refuse offers of shelter do not have a right to remain in place, meaning they can be swept – https://www.ktvu.com/news/san-francisco-can-step-up-efforts-to-clear-homeless-encampments. I haven’t read the Burien ordinance in detail but the reports I have read indicate it was written along the same lines.

    “The court clarified what “involuntary” means, specifying the city can enforce the laws against people who are choosing to stay on the streets and declining shelter services. The San Francisco Chronicle was the first to report that the Ninth Circuit of U.S. Appeals clarified that unhoused residents who refuse shelter services cannot camp out on city streets.

    City Attorney David Chiu said over half of those being offered services are declining.

    “After months of confusion, the Court has acknowledged that individuals are not involuntarily homeless if they have declined a specific offer of available shelter or otherwise have access to such shelter or the means to obtain it,” said San Francisco Mayor London Breed. “Our City workers have been doing the best job they can in carrying out encampment resolutions under the injunction, and they are now getting prepared to enforce these laws in light of this recent clarification by the Ninth Circuit.”

  10. The mullahs in Teheran must be plenty pissed that they can’t blame those bombs on Israel or the United States. I guess they could still figure out a way to do so, but they’d look pretty silly trying after the scary off-shoot of the other branch of Islam has told Iran. “Naw, babies, it wuz us.”

    “Damn!” says Iran. But isn’t it refreshing news that ISIS is a non-discriminatory monster?

  11. The problem with conversion of office space to residential usage, isn’t that “it’s sort of a goofy idea”, but rather so far it’s an expensive one. With different articles stating conversions are as much as $1K per square foot, conversions are not economically feasible- unless that amount is lowered.

    Residential real estate has featured business uses for years (e. g. artists’ lofts). Once the costs involved are lowered, you will see more office spaces become residential.

  12. @16 I don’t think it’s just the cost of the buildings. It’s also the cost of conversion. Office buildings tend to be set up with a few major plumbing and elevator towers from top to bottom. You have two to eight restrooms on each floor depending on the size of the building, and all of that plumbing is right near the main pipe stacks. You might have break rooms/basic kitchens in there, but also probably located near the main stack and no range hoods.

    Once you turn those into residential units, each unit has 2-3 bathrooms plus a kitchen. Getting all of that piping back to the main stacks isn’t cheap, nor is installing a real range hood vent for each unit. And while it’s not a big deal on this particular office building, full-city-block office towers have so much floor area relative to the number of windows that you end up with an awful lot of rooms with no windows. Then you get into code issues about bedrooms and/or a relatively small number of extremely expensive units on each floor.

  14. @19 The thing I hate to hear most from my clients is along the lines of “There’s so much good steel in this hull, why throw that away and build new?” Costs of conversions have a habit of creeping up on you, in a variety of different ways. I’m not saying it can’t be done, just that it’s often a lot harder/more expensive than you think it ought to be.

    Don’t get me wrong–I’d love to see lots of these buildings get converted to residential, especially historic buildings like the Smith Tower. It would be great for all of the reasons you mention. I just don’t think we’re going to win over the cold-hearted accountants in the short to medium term. That said, if this conversion works out and the developer makes money, there will be people willing to start up more projects.

    One other factor is that the traditional market for relatively expensive residential units like these is tech employees. Those folks don’t seem to be as willing to open their wallets for new housing since the layoffs started. I’ve seen a bunch of upper-end-of-market newbuilds sit vacant for far longer than you would have expected. I’m not shedding a tear for the developers, but I also know they aren’t going to be excited to leap into the conversion market unless they know they can sell the units.

  16. Because we need to discuss Epstein, but Dershowitz wants to demonstrate (deflect) he is better than Hamas…

    “The one point I do wanna make is that I understand all the feminist groups and radicals who think this is the worst thing in the world—that anybody ever had any contact with Jeffrey Epstein—where are all those radical feminists when it comes to the Hamas rapes of young Jewish girls, sexual abuse, beheadings?”—Alan Dershowitz responding, on Wednesday night’s Hannity, to the 137 mentions of his name in the recently unsealed Epstein court documents.

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