Victory. Credit: Steph Chambers / GETTY

The gays win again: Newcastle’s city council voted two weeks ago not to raise a Pride flag at City Hall. At the time, Mayor Robert Clark said raising the flag would lead to a slippery slope—if they raised the Pride flag, then they’d also have to raise the Hamas flag, a MAGA flag, or even an Antifa flag, KOMO reports. After a flood of people spoke up during public testimony and called bullshit, the council reversed that decision in a 4-3 vote Tuesday and the City put the flag up. But before the vote, the mayor railed against the “hate” in the “midst” of the pride movement and registered his staunch opposition to recognizing the ongoing legacy of slavery and Jim Crow in contemporary society as well as any attempts that seek to repair it. 

Cop stops former deputy mayor in what she called a “stop and frisk”: A Seattle police officer stopped former Senior Deputy Mayor Monisha Harrell in Greenwood on Sunday and told her he was checking for stolen vehicles in the area, Publicola reports. Harrell, the mayor’s niece, stepped down in September after reported disagreements with other city leaders about public safety. She says the stop was an example of racial profiling. SPD says the stop was part of the officer’s training and “was made because the [license] plate was obscured by a dark license plate cover,” the department told Publicola.

Mass layoffs at the Everett Herald: The Daily Herald‘s new owners cut more than half of the newsroom’s jobs Wednesday in part of a series of layoffs across Sound Publishing. The company laid off two editors plus 10 reporters, photographers, and designers. The cuts leave just one photographer, no full-time designers or digital staff, and a handful of reporters and editors. Publisher Rudi Alcott claimed “readers won’t notice” changes from the cuts. Lol fuck off. 

Experts assure us there’s no need to worry about the little earthquakes under Mount St. Helens: Hundreds of small earthquakes below Mount St. Helens signal increasing magma levels beneath our region’s most seismically active volcano, but the United States Geological Survey “emphasized that this increase in activity does not indicate any increased threat or danger associated with the mountain,” KING 5 reports. 

Pierce County deputies shoot, injure man: Deputies shot the man early Wednesday after responding to a call about an argument, though details are unclear. KIRO reports the 911 caller said her brother had a knife, deputies attempted to talk to him, he ran to a shed, and “deputies reported that shots were fired and a man was hit.” The man is now in critical condition.

MAX crash families seek fine, criminal charge against Boeing: Some families of people killed in two Boeing 737 MAX crashes in 2018 and 2019 say federal officials should fine Boeing $24.8 billion and pursue a criminal charge against the company. The ask comes as the Justice Department began reconsidering a prosecution that paused three years ago after Boeing struck a deal to meet certain safety conditions. Federal prosecutors said in May Boeing did not comply with the terms of that agreement. 

The weather: Yesterday was gorgeous, and today will follow suit. Expect highs near 80 in Seattle today through Saturday. 

Seattle is dying: “Rainier Square … saw robust leasing activity in the first quarter as users ate away at more of the 720,000 square feet that Amazon never occupied,” the Puget Sound Business Journal reports. 

Holocaust Center for Humanity vandalized: Someone wrote “Genocide in Gaza” on the window of the Holocaust Center in Belltown and the police are now investigating the vandalism as a hate crime, KOMO reports. Quit fucking tagging Jewish institutions; you’re co-opting an anti-genocide movement with antisemitic nonsense. 

43rd Legislative District Dems condemn Democratic Congressman Adam Smith: On a podcast, Rep. Smith called protesters who shouted him down at a recent town hall and others who protested at his house “leftwing fascists” and “totalitarians” who only aim to intimidate and silence those who disagree with them on, you know, not sending weapons to Israel, a country currently slaughtering en masse people it has caged in an open-air prison for years. In a recent meeting, the 43rd LD Dems called bullshit on Smith’s remarks, censured him, and reaffirmed the rights of peaceful protesters. 

Sue Rahr is ready to lead on good vibes: The new interim chief of the Seattle Police Department tells the local Fox affiliate that she’s “getting great ideas from the front line.” Rahr describes herself as a “coach” who doesn’t plan to “strap on a gun belt and pretend that I’m still competent to work the streets” and won’t be extending her six-month stay. 

I really need the polls to do something different:

Get off of my cloud: Wall Street freaks and Silicon Valley goons obsessed with trying to find One Weird Trick to solve every problem are paying University of Washington scientists to brighten clouds, but earlier this month yet another city told the researchers to leave their clouds the fuck alone, Politico reports. The scientists think brightening the clouds will reflect some sunlight away from the Earth and help reduce global warming, which might be true, but imagine if these philanthropists spent as much money trying to get Congress to pass a Green New Deal as they did on this shit. 

SCOTUS rulings: Today the Supreme Court upheld a tax on unrealized gains, which would be good news for wealth tax supporters if Justice Kavanaugh hadn’t written the opinion so narrowly. In another ruling, the clerics decided that prosecutors can use testimony about what “most people” do against defendants. Many people are saying that’s dumb.  

Big news: Lily Munster’s (née Dracula) dental bridge sold at auction. The hot-tempered Munster matriarch’s mouth gear went for $1,040. Halloween is just around the corner. 

These kids don’t need Jesus, they need math teachers: On Wednesday, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry signed a blatantly unconstitutional law requiring schools to display the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms, the Washington Post reports. The law requires the displays to be “at least eleven inches by fourteen inches,” and schools must use “donated posters or spend donated money, rather than public funds, to purchase the displays.” US News and World Report ranks Louisiana K-12 education as 40th in the country. Landry says he “cant wait” to be sued. 

Draft parity talks reemerge: Members of Congress will mull a Senate proposal to extend the selective service requirement to women, and another proposal to automatically register men between the ages of 18 and 25 for the service, according to the New York Times. Republicans like the latter proposal but don’t like the former. Honestly, making women eligible for the draft and even bringing it back sounds like a good way to make people care about foreign policy in more serious ways and reduce the power of The Blob, which would probably make the world a less violent place. 

Israel v Lebanon war heats up: Yesterday Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah “threatened to invade northern Israel if a full-scale war with Israel broke out,” and Israel said that “operational plans for an offensive in Lebanon had been ‘approved and validated,'” according to the BBC. Hezbollah will stop if Israel signs the ceasefire agreement, but Netanyahu wants more war. A full-scale invasion of Lebanon could draw Iran into the war, which would draw the US into the war even more than we already are, and death and destruction would spread. 

Houthis sink another vessel in the Red Sea: Last week Houthi fighters attacked a Greek ship, and that ship has now sunk, Al Jazeera reports. Houthis have been attacking ships with drones and explosives in an attempt to pressure Israel into agreeing to a ceasefire. They’ve hit some US ships, and in response we’ve conducted 400 airstrikes on Yemen, a strategy that doesn’t appear to be working. 

I leave you with Phil Cordell’s “Red Lady.” Enjoy the sun!

 

Rich Smith is The Stranger's former News Editor. He writes about politics, books, and performance. You can read his poems at www.richsmithpoetry.com

59 replies on “Slog AM: Mass Layoffs at Everett Herald, Pride Flag Flies over Newcastle, Louisiana Mandates Display of Ten Commandments in Public Schools”

  1. @55 Tensor has a very special hatred of Sawant whose reelections proved him and his corporate overlords wrong on several occasions. Spitefully, he has always tried to spin her leaving office on her own terms as if she were defeated.

  2. @54 Your constant cherry picking is tiresome but it’s all you can do so you’ll keep doing it, right? Anyhow your overly long comment is not really worth a response because it contains so much falsehood. Nevertheless, I’ll be kind and give you the shorter and succinct version (which you’ll ignore anyway to construct another strawman argument)

    Palestine:

    Israel only claims to want to destroy Hamas because it’s an excuse to proceed with ethnic cleansing like they have always done during periods of generalized warfare. Even the command of IDF agrees that getting rid of Hamas isn’t possible. However, TERRORizing Palestinians off their land then deny them the right of return has repeatedly worked in the past, so rinse and repeat.

    America:

    American colonists were anti-colonial? funny, are you even conscious when you write? Anyhow, yes American patriots killed loyalists in great numbers: “there was a lot of bloodshed, and particularly in the South. And gangs of revolutionaries, gangs of loyalists, would attack each other, go to each other’s plantations. In fact, some of the big battles in the South happened after the surrender at Yorktown. So, what all of this means is that there was a climate of violence and a climate of fear for many loyalists.”

    https://www.npr.org/2015/07/03/419824333/what-happened-to-british-loyalists-after-the-revolutionary-war

    In other words, in modern parlance, Patriots, Loyalists committed war crimes and acts of terror.

    Unfortunately rape is quite common during warfare, and not only, and I’ll leave you to ponder whether some of those gangs of patriots also committed rape but I wouldn’t surprised if they did.

    India: ” It began with violence in the late afternoon of May 10 in Meerut with the sepoys destroying government buildings — the jail, record room, kachehri, telegraph office — and going on to destroy the bungalows in which the firangi lived.

    The peasants of the surrounding villages participated in the destruction. What accompanied the destruction was the killing of the White population of Meerut, irrespective of gender and age.”

    https://www.rediff.com/news/special/the-forgotten-brutality-of-the-1857-mutiny/20170814.htm

    I won’t bother answer the rest as I don’t want to spend more time but be sure that it is riddled with non-truth as well.

  4. @58: In response to your attempted dismissal of Hamas’ terrorism, I generously gave you three actual anti-colonialist conflicts. You managed to use exactly none of them. To get anywhere close to the terrorist brutality Hamas showed just last year, you had to cite a conflict from the days of slavery and serfdom. Even there, you didn’t cite a single example of rape or kidnapping. That alone should tell you just how badly your apologia for Hamas’ terrorism has failed.

    The only documented ethnic cleansing Israel ever committed in Gaza was when it removed Jewish settlers. You’re free to tell us just how well Israel’s anti-settler activity helped bring lasting peace to Gaza. Please, show us your keen understanding of that colonialist history.

  6. @61 the citations I gave you demonstrated without a doubt that according to modern understanding war crime/terrorism was used during these wars of independence (again, calling American colonists “anti-colonialist” must be a joke that only you don’t get). These examples didn’t specifically discuss “rape and kidnapping”, but a) I am not sure why you make it a litmus test of terror as if murdering folk didn’t qualify, and b) it is very likely that if bands of people went around killing and burning, rape was also likely committed.

    You are usually fond of claiming that wars have consequences to justify Israel’s multiple land grabs, but now you also claim that Israel didn’t commit ethnic cleansing? so, which is it? Talking with you is a fucking waste of time.

  9. Hello Rich! Hadn’t seen an article by you for a while, it’s nice to know the stranger’s token white male is still around. Take care and keep your head down…

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