Scarf weather: I’m trying to become a scarf-wearing girlie and today’s a pretty good day to help solidify that identity. The morning will start out cloudy with temperatures in the low 40s. Then the sun will peak out around 11 am and temperatures will steadily rise to a high of 46 around 2 pm. Then, as these things tend to go, the temperatures will drift back down as it gets dark. Sounds like scarf weather to me!
California update: Southern California is still very much on fire. As of this morning, the fires, which include the record-breaking blaze in Palisades and another historic inferno in Eaton, have killed at least five people, forced tens of thousands under mandatory evacuation orders, destroyed at least 2,000 structures, and burned more than 27,000 acres. While many of the fires stand at 0% containment, firefighters made headway overnight to contain the Sunset fire, which triggered evacuation orders in Hollywood last night.
City budget’s matter: Ahead of the huge wildfire outbreak in Southern California, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass reportedly cut more than $17 million from the fire department’s budget. According to the NBC4 report, most of the $17 million was absorbed by cutting fire department administration positions, but $7 million in variable overtime had to be axed. However, a Politico report found the claim about the budget cuts, which spread like wildfire (sorry) on social media, was not quite as black and white as it seems. From Politico: “The city was in the process of negotiating a new contract with the fire department at the time the budget was being crafted, so additional funding for the department was set aside in a separate fund until that deal was finalized in November. In fact, the city’s fire budget increased more than $50 million year-over-year compared to the last budget cycle, according to Blumenfield’s office, although overall concerns about the department’s staffing level have persisted for a number of years.”
Most succinct fact-check I’ve read of how LA Fire Dept’s budget wasn’t recently cut — in fact, the opposite — from @politico.com. But that misinformation spread anyway. www.politico.com/news/2025/01…
— Ali Vitali (@alivitali.bsky.social) January 9, 2025 at 4:59 AM
Take the fucking bus: Local media is complaining about increased traffic and packed parking lots in the wake of Amazon’s new return-to-office mandate. However, the Seattle Department of Transportation is monitoring the situation and not really noticing a huge influx of traffic compared to this time last year. But now’s as good a time as ever to remind you that taking the bus is awesome and the more of us who do it the faster we can all get where we need to go!
Now, Ashley, take it away!
Mayor Bruce Harrell’s oopsy: On Tuesday, Harrell sent out a release celebrating the City’s progress on police recruitment. He boasted about how, for the first time since 2019, the Seattle Police Department (SPD) had hired more officers than it lost and the number of deployable officers had increased by 141 in a single year. Unbelievable, you might say. And you’d be correct. The mayor had to send out a follow-up press release to say that the total number of deployable officers only increased by about 20 compared to 2023. Also good to note that while the number of hirings did surpass separations from the police department in 2024, they only surpassed the number of separations by one: hiring 84 cops and losing 83. And they promptly lost an officer in the first couple weeks of January by firing Kevin Dave, so I’d call that a draw. But no, we should celebrate spending an additional $96 million on a new police contract and a couple million in 2024 to boost advertising for cops, as well as creating permanent hiring bonuses, all to add an additional 20 cops. Amazing fiscal responsibility, Mayor Harrell.
Thanks, Ashley! Back to me.
Someone had to do it! The Seattle Times is suing the Seattle Police Department (SPD) for delaying public records requests, denying the public transparency guaranteed by state law. SPD’s records come especially slowly because a 2017 policy allowed the department to “group” requests made by a single person into one, even when those requests were made months apart. So each new request empowered SPD to add greater and greater delays and punish journalists with strong, recurring interest, as the Seattle Times’s lawyer argued. In 2023, SPD agreed to reform the grouping practice so that it would only group requests within 8 weeks of each other. However, the lawsuit alleges SPD stopped complying with that agreement sometime last year.
ICYMI: Did you see that Council Member Cathy Moore went on a little tirade in the first council meeting back? The City Council is starting to talk about the One Seattle Comprehensive Plan (long overdue! Looking at you, Mr. Mayor) and there’s going to be a lot—a lot—of debate as evidenced by Moore’s impassioned and kinda confusing remarks. To be honest, I don’t know what to make of it. She’s mad about affordability. And while it is true that we cannot simply build our way out of the housing crisis, I don’t think she has much authority to talk about affordability…
I am sympathetic to cries for affordability more than the market urbanist Moore has built in her head, but this falls flat when it seems CM Moore is poised to rollback renters rights and she introduced the Chamber’s alternative to the social housing funding initiative. https://t.co/8N4Jr7Tzyk pic.twitter.com/RXchOBHSXT
— Hannah Krieg (@hannahkrieg) January 8, 2025
Oh! Elected officials in Cle Elum are considering declaring bankruptcy, a move that’s “almost unheard of for cities in Washington,” according to the Seattle Times. The city is financially fucked because late last year an arbitrator ruled Cle Elum owes $22.2 million to a developer after repeatedly violating an agreement related to a plan to build nearly 1,000 homes near downtown. That’s a lot of money considering the city’s budget is about $5 million a year.
The new minimum wage is a good thing actually: Conservative media has spent a lot of time these first days of 2025 trying to construct a narrative that the new minimum wage is destroying small businesses. If a business has already closed this year—before many people have seen their first paycheck of 2025—and the business is blaming the new wage, which they had a ten-year warning about, know that they are misplacing blame. They should be mad at their landlords for making it too expensive to rent a commercial space; or at restrictive zoning laws that tamp down development, depriving their neighborhood of more people and thus their business of more customers; or, at themselves for buying too much avocado toast, or whatever conservatives tell young people when they complain about money.
Interesting timing: ABC News reported that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito talked to President-elect Donald Trump on the phone just hours before Trump’s lawyers filed an emergency request asking the justices to halt sentencing in his criminal hush money case. Really looks like Trump was calling to tell his conservative cronies what to do, but Alito says they didn’t discuss the case. He claims he was calling as a job reference to help one of his former law clerks get a position in the new administration. To be honest, that excuse doesn’t comfort me. Sounds like a good reason to make a little trade! The court is expected to decide on Trump’s request by Friday morning.
América Mexicana: After President-Elect Donald Trump said he’s going to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, Mexico’s president Claudia Sheinbaum jokingly suggested renaming North America to “ “América Mexicana.” She said, “That sounds nice, no?”
On this day in music history: Backstreet Boys member AJ McClean was born. Happy 47th birthday, man. This ones for you!
“Take the fucking bus:”
Just don’t take it tomorrow. 440 (and growing) of 660 drivers scheduled to be on duty, will be off for murdered driver Sean Kim’s Memorial. Don’t expect to see a bus on time, or at all, tomorrow.
@1, Shawn Yim
so
When
did schlogg Am
make the Leap to Pm?
is this all due
to Thedonolde?
I guess
Everything’s
up for Grabs now
‘thanks’
Obama.
@2, Correct. My apologies.
@4 No need to apologize. Everyone knows you’re a moron.
@5: Courtesy is not moronic.
“But now’s as good a time as ever to remind you that taking the bus is awesome and the more of us who do it the faster we can all get where we need to go!”
YES YES YES… but… awesome people cannot get where we want to go when the cars are in the way of the bus. That was in full view early New Years catching a bus home from the Seattle Center. Sure New Years at the Needle is a tough test as the drone show and fireworks display with the Space Needle as the launching point is THE BEST SHOW ON THE PLANET and draws a great crowd. Seattle failed this transportation test bigly with hour+ long waits for every bus because of lines of cars in the way. SDOT didn’t prep streets for transit priority. Traffic control did nothing to prioritize transit. Even existing transit lanes were not enforced. Transit needs priority always and failing that we should expect people to not be awesome. Had people sat idly in their cars early morning 2025 watching transit zoom by then there would be far more awesome people for new year’s 2026. Of course this doesn’t just hold for new years eve celebrations. Transit priority needs to be every stinking day please!
Kudos to Metro and Sound Transit for free fare new years… that’s awesome. Wish we had that 24/7/365.
speaking of spending
our Hard-earned Taxes on
Massacring alotta Homeless:
more on the
Is-it-Genocide? debate/
Distraction by focusing on Definirions:
The Zionists
Kill Doctors in Gaza
and Silence Them Here
WTFF?
(w/ Rupa Marya) | The Chris Hedges Report
“The protection of hospitals
during warfare is paramount and
must be respected by all sides, at all times.”
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said, “The protection of hospitals during warfare is paramount and must be respected by all sides, at all times.”
International law enshrines medical facilities as sanctuaries for those in direst need but as Dr. Rupa Marya tells host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, Israel’s attacks on hospitals amidst the ongoing genocide represent a catastrophic violation of this principle.
A professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, Marya now faces suspension for speaking out against Israel’s blatant violations of international law.
“The killing of healthcare workers [in Gaza] is related to the silencing of healthcare workers here [in the U.S.], and that by silencing us, the medical institutions we are a part of, which have an obligation, professionally and morally, to uphold all life, are actually abetting and enabling genocide,” Marya tells Hedges.
Marya describes the horror scenes at hospitals across Gaza. The IDF not only targets hospitals with airstrikes but also enters them to deploy gun strapped drones that kill patients and staff as well as destroy vital medical machines and instruments.
“Hamas is not hiding in those machines. This is an attempt to shorten the life of Palestinian people,” Marya says.
Mayra, collaborating with a handful of medical professionals and lawyers, is authoring a UN report, addressing what they refer to as “the genocide enablement apparatus of Israel.”
Alongside bringing critical attention to the collapse of Gaza’s healthcare system, they urge the inclusion of medical professionals future international legal frameworks for defining genocide. “It does not take months to see that this was a genocide.
So for those of us who were in touch with the physicians on the ground and the healthcare workers on the ground in October, it was clear that this was a genocide.”
–byChris Hedges
Jan 09, 2025
This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.
oodles more
including Chris’ disturbingly
illuminating interview w/ Rupa Marya
https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-zionists-kill-doctors-in-gaza?
Shrieking
“Look — a HAMAS!”
doesn’t give one Carde Blanche
to murder a hundred thousand souls
in Spite of what
our resident
Apologists
AIPACers
LOVE to
Claim.
@7, So more cops to make transit work.
@8: “Marya now faces suspension for speaking out against Israel’s blatant violations of international law.”
Actually, according to her employer, she faces suspension for unlawful discrimination on the basis of national origin. Of all the champions of Palestine, this is the one you choose to celebrate? Ha ha, don’t let me stop you! 😂😂😂
ah!
shooting
the Messenger.
well-played,🔨🛴.
‘Marya describes
the horror scenes at
hospitals across Gaza.
The IDF
not only targets
hospitals with airstrikes
but also enters them to deploy gun-
strapped drones that kill patients and staff
as well as destroy vital medical machines and instruments.
“Hamas
is not hiding
in those machines.
This is an attempt to short-
en the life of Palestinian
people,” Marya says.
Mayra, collaborating with a handful of medical professionals and lawyers, is authoring a UN report, addressing what they refer to as “the genocide enablement apparatus of Israel.”
Alongside bringing critical attention to the collapse of Gaza’s healthcare system, they urge the inclusion of medical professionals future international legal frameworks for defining genocide.
“It does not take months
to see that this was a genocide.
So for those of us who were in touch
with the physicians on the ground
and the healthcare workers on
the ground in October, it was
clear that this was
a genocide.”
–@Rupa Marya
but yeah pls
don’t Listen
to her. she
did What
was it?
@11: Ha ha, well I’m not shooting any messenger. I just wonder whether a messenger whose employment has been suspended for discrimination is a messenger anyone should trust. 😃 Your call of course!
Say, speaking of trustworthy messengers, you see that NY Times article a couple days ago where the Hamas fighter says they’ve been using the hospital to store weapons and stage patrols? And he’s also an employee of the hospital? 😂😂😂
@12 you’re ‘not shooting
any mesengers’ Just like
Israel’s not committing
any War Crimes, right?
oh
🔨🛴*
you crack me up!
*’discrimination’?
you Don’t say!
at least if ain’t
Humanicide!
am I write
or What?
oh &
Oodles
of Smiley
Faces to You two!
btw which do
you prefer
🔨🛴
🛴🔨
I like the latter
cuz it really
shows off
your ruth-
lessness
& your
Childish
sense of
“Humor!”
what Was that Chant?
‘there Is No school
In Gaza – we Killed
all of your Children!’
smiley face!
smiley face!
smiley face!
ad vomitas!
@13: lol, first time I’ve ever seen a lefty put “discrimination” in scare quotes. I wonder why the change… 😂😂😂
@🛴🔨
but
was it
Full-blown
“Discrimination”?
cuz
our Standards
are Quite Fucking Hi.
@16: “our Standards are Quite Fucking Hi.”
…at least when it comes to certain groups! 😉
nyt:
House
Passes Bill to
Punish I.C.C. Officials
for Israeli Prosecutions
The measure, which would impose sanctions,
is on track for likely enactment given support
for it among Republicans and
President-elect Trump.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/09/us/politics/icc-sanctions-house-israel.html
Welcome
To fascism
In Amerika
where it’s Only a
War Crime IF
Thedonolde
Says it Is.
You must be
Over the
!Moon!
🛴🔨.
@18: lol, if I were in Congress I likely would not have voted to sanction the ICC personnel.
I do think the ICC prosecutor brought a bad case against the Israelis: legally inadmissible under Article 17 and factually untrue under Articles 7 and 8. But even though I think it’s a bad case, there are still plenty of defenses Israel can raise in court and in the area of diplomacy to protect its officials. The court has even hinted it would be open to an Article 17 defense by Israel. I would reserve the sanctioning of ICC personnel for cases of truly egregious misconduct by the court, which this case is not.
Still, the sanctioning of the ICC personnel is not without merit, even though it wouldn’t have been my choice. The members of Congress who voted for it have their hearts in the right place, they just went a little farther than the situation warrants! 😄