The Who’s Who of the SPD January Sixers: After a lengthy court battle to keep their identities secret, we now officially have the names of four of the Seattle Police Department cops who went to the insurrection a week after they dropped their lawsuit. Drum roll please. The democracy denying boys in blue aaaaare…. Sgt. Jacob Briskey, Sgt. Scotty Bach, Detective Michael Settle, and Officer Jason Marchione. Two other SPD cops, Officers Alexander Everett and Caitlin Rochelle Everett, were identified earlier after being fired since they trespassed on the US Capitol during all of the insurrection festivities. Of course, this is hardly news since Divest SPD, released the names of these cops years ago, but this is the first time we’ve had confirmation from the City.
Light Rail Has Gone to the Dogs: We are a dog city. A dog county, really. Sound Transit’s board green lit policy yesterday to let all leashed pooches on light rail trains. Frankly, I didn’t know there was a dog ban given all those rule-breaking pups I’ve seen catching a ride on the 1 Line. The new dog decree was born out of the freshly minted Marymoor Village Station which is close to the 40-acre off-leash area in Marymoor Park. “It’s time for walkies,” Sound Transit board Chair Dave Somers said. I hate that he said that.
In Other Light Rail News: The extension to Federal Way could open as soon as this winter, according to the Sound Transit Board. That would unveil stops in Kent, Des Moines, Star Lake, and downtown Federal Way. One day, if we’re good, maybe we will even reach Tacoma. And will the light rail ever stretch across the lake to link up with the 2 line in Bellevue? Maybe! In the meantime, Sound Transit is trying to deter thievery after a few bandits stole away with copper wire from the eastside tracks on two different occasions earlier this summer, causing power outages on the line. They’re installing security cameras.
A Bear! Near Golden Gardens! Neighbors near Golden Gardens in Ballard spotted a bear this week. They believe it was a black bear. The sighting isn’t officially confirmed, but if it is true, this would be the first bear sighting in that area since 2009. You can’t blame a bear for wanting a good bonfire spot. The Department of Fish and Wildlife said the bear likely ended up in the area by taking the series of greenbelts along Puget Sound. Well, he probably didn’t take the Burke Gilman with that missing link, right? Right??
A Fire! Near the Columbia River Gorge! A fire that sparked around a week ago is now the largest in the state. The Burdoin fire currently takes up 11,000 acres. That is, I’m told, a lot of acres. The Burdoin fire is one of four other large fires raging statewide. This is climate change, baby. Summers are for burning now. And we aren’t even close to done with fire season.
France Recognizes Palestine Statehood: In the midst of war crime-caused famine where special food for malnourished children is weeks away from running dry, French president Emmanuel Macron said he will recognize a Palestinian state, becoming the first western power to do so. This recognition won’t officially happen until September at the United Nations general assembly.
No Quick Bucks for Chuck: Florida police arrested a man for credit card fraud while he was at his job. Unfortunately, his job was dressing up as a big gray mouse. You may know him. “Chuck E., come with me,” the cops said as they entered the Tallahassee Chuck E. Cheese. The suspect allegedly did the credit card fraud while working at Chuck E. Cheese. You can’t trust anyone these days. Not even Chuck himself. Sigh.
A Chuck E. Cheese employee in full costume was arrested by Tallahassee officers for credit card fraud
www.tallahassee.com/story/news/l…
— Phil Lewis (@phillewis.bsky.social) July 24, 2025 at 10:41 AM
ICYMI: THING, the music festival, cancelled its upcoming festival date showcasing Latinx and Spanish-language artists, due to concerns about Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. “Community safety concerns have greatly reduced ticket sales, and the uncertainty about artists’ ability to secure the necessary visas has led to our decision,” they said in a statement. This isn’t the first local event to shut down for these reasons. In June, the Duwamish River Community Coalition canceled the Duwamish River Festival due to concerns that ICE might target it, and earlier this month, the Burien nonprofit Joyas Mestizas announced that they would cancel the Pacific Northwest Folklórico Festival this year. Stranger Staff Writer Julianne Bell has more here.
Closing Walls and Ticking Clocks: Kristin Cabot, the human resources executive caught in the embrace of her CEO at the Coldplay concert, has resigned from her role at Astronomer. Her resignation follows CEO Andy Byron’s own resignation.
Hold on. Charles Mudede has something to say.
Did I see that? Did I see Trump’s hard-on yapping in the desert? Yes, I did. His sunbaked business appeared on a new episode of South Park, a show I thought was history a long time ago. But apparently it’s still around. In fact, Paramount just paid the show’s creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, a cool $1.5 billion for “50 new episodes over the next five years.” Yes, the same Paramount that, on July 2, paid Trump $16 million to settle a lawsuit concerning an episode of CBS’ “60 Minutes.” South Park‘s season premiere even has a scene with the presenters of “60 Minutes” cowering to Trump (sorry, cows, I didn’t mean to disrespect you like that). We also see Trump trying to have sex with Satan, Trump fucking a sheep, Trump suing a painter for making his business too small in a portrait. And then the desert scene. And then it—Trump’s penis—talks. How will I ever get that out of my mind?
Um, thanks for that, Charles. Back to me.
Were you at Candidate Survivor last night? If not, you missed a lot. We learned that Seattle City Council District 2 candidate Adonis Ducksworth is too cool to have fun. (He at least made a cool song and read a bad poem.) We learned that his competition, Eddie Lin, can juggle and walk on his hands. We learned that Mayoral candidate Katie Wilson used to busk at Pike Place. (She demonstrated her act, playing the harmonica and guitar simultaneously.) We learned that City Attorney Erika Evans always knows the assignment. (She made a diss rap about incumbent Ann Davison, and ultimately won the competition.) And we learned that Jamie Fackler knows how to commit to a bit. He didn’t officially make it on stage because his campaign hadn’t reached the fundraising threshold when event invitations went out, but he still showed up outside dressed as Shrek with a rented donkey, and even jumped on stage with City Attorney candidate Rory O’Sullivan to try to hype his performance.
I Hate When This Happens: Race officials shortened the 19th stage of the Tour de France to avoid climbs in the mountainous areas “where an outbreak of nodular dermatitis affected a herd of cows.” The contagious lumpy skin outbreak resulted in their culling. May they wear the king of the mountain’s polka dot jersey in heaven.
A Song for Your Friday: It just seems appropriate.
More in NEWS
Local (and not-so-local) news from your favorite writers.
This was outrageous and sickening:
https://www.thestranger.com/politics/2025/07/25/80165333/what-you-missed-at-candidate-survivor-last-night
thirteen12 @3 @4 @15 @28 @42 @45 @48, while you’re waiting for Buddhamat to answer your question, here’s a question for you. To follow on Totoman’s keen observation @17, are you a paid right-wing influencer charged with setting “Trump traps” for the libs, or are you just a deeply unhappy person?
@50 deeply unhappy person, but I’d be even more unhappy if I agreed with Trump on homeless response like Aguecheek, Buddhamat, and so many others here
@51 Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
The correct response to this new Trump action is to say Show Me The Money.
For the last five years Democrats in California, New York, Oregon, and Washington have started to realize that the problem with lunatics on the streets is not just the Reagan era defunding of institutions, but also the simultaneous efforts to make civil commitment almost impossible.
Trump is right, we can’t just meet people where they are when where they are is shooting up in Pioneer Square while crapping their pants. We can’t let them refuse services. They need to be institutionalized. There’s two reasons why we can’t. One is laws that hinder commitment, the other is money for mental hospitals. So rather than just reflexively oppose this because Trump said it, change the narrative. Say, “yes you are right, we can’t let drug addled individuals determine their treatment, so give us the money to force them into treatment.”
I think it was Nicholas Kristof who said Trump has all the wrong answers to all of the questions no one else is willing to ask.
Giving the federal government another avenue to detain people is probably not a great idea given their abuses of the immigration system right now but more than anything I would like someone to please explain how they think we are going to pay to house and treat people for mental illness and addiction?
Do you have any idea how much that costs? Do you know republicans just made cuts to medicaid that will result in hospital and emergency room closures across the country over the next few years? What do you think will happen to our remaining institutions when the government forces them to take on the most expensive and difficult cases? Good luck with all that.
53 – With more of a demand for treatment centers, don’t you think that treatment centers could be more profitable and offer more service options for patients? It’s an easier fix than curbing climate change.
The problem is not demand, it’s a lack of resources to pay for it. The demand already exists but we don’t have universal healthcare in this country and the people who need these services the most are least likely to have it because they are unemployable. Medicaid is/was our stopgap to pay back hospitals for treating people without coverage but republicans decided we don’t need that anymore.
If we don’t want public money paying for basic emergency services, who is going to pay for rehab or indefinite institutionalization? Some people already think addicts and the homeless are unworthy of narcan treatment and that costs less than $20/dose. Imagine how they’re going to feel knowing we’re spending hundreds of thousands a pop on inpatient care that will most likely fail?
The billion dollars that Seattle spent/wasted this past decade on failed homeless services, could easily have funded more prisons/hospitals to lock up those types of people.
@53, @55: It wasn’t a detailed proposal, it was a rejoinder to 1312’s endless Trump-baiting of liberals here.
As @56 noted, even when the money was available, it was lavishly squandered, so even if such money was still available (and you’re correct, it isn’t), there would be little enthusiasm for spending it.
@53
Wayback in 2017 the Puget Sound Business Journal’s found that total spending on homeless services in Seattle was $1 Billion people per year. “The Price of Homelessness: Humanitarian crisis costs Seattle area more than $1B” PSBJ Nov 22, 2017.
And that report doesn’t even include the losses due to lost opportunities caused by having encampments drive customers and businesses away.
Go read the long piece in the NY Times yesterday headlined Inside the Rise of the Multiracial Right. (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/07/24/opinion/minority-voters-trump-right.html). It goes into details about how the left’s inflexibility in dealing with issues is causing the Democrats to hemorrhage voters to the Republicans.
The majority of people understand the need for civl commitments to deal with the people who have melted their brains with drugs. Reflexively opposing everything Trump says and does is just going to bite us in the ass when the GOP gains seats in the midterms and when JD Vance or someone worse is elected president in 2028.
The reality is that in the 2024 elections we got our asses handed to us and it’s because we ignored what voters across the country were concerned with most, immigration, inflation, and crime.
Most voters in most congressional districts don’t give a flying fuck what your student loan payment is or what your personal pronoun is.
All sticking your fingers in your ears and refusing to understand this dynamic is going to accomplish is making sure it just gets worse with every election.
Really hoping some ambitious Democrat steps up to challenge my congressidiot, Suzan DelBene. That do-nothing has got to go.
55: Maybe the availability of Narcan is seen by addicts as another excuse to get high. That’s a problem.
Guys, treating people for mental illness and addiction is a form heath care and the trump administration just defunded it. This isn’t a question of what may or may not be a good idea but how we manage health care for people without insurance. We lack the funding and the political will to treat people who are uninsured for any medical condition you can name, not just mental illness or addiction. If a cancer patient gets left in the dust for no coverage why would you expect anyone else to get hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of “free” health care for a medical condition people believe they personally chose, or is effectively untreatable?
If the city is spending a billion dollars to push people around and throw away their belongings, how much do you think it would cost to house and treat them, in some cases indefinitely? I don’t have the figures but i promise you it is substantially higher than 1 billion dollars. I am always in favor of helping people who need it but i am not delusional about how this country treats people in the most need.
@60, They’re getting high because they are physically dependent on a highly addictive drug. There is zero rationale beyond giving their body the substance it needs to function.
@61: Again, these are not proposals, because any such proposal is a no-go in our post-“Genocide Joe” political climate the Stranger & friends hath wrought. They are answers to the “liberals ❤️ Trump” baiting which 1312 just here employed to distract from how we got here, nothing more. The persons with whom you claim you argue here completely agree with you on the costs and needs for medical treatment. (We also know it’s not possible now, so no need for your lecture on that, either.)
“If the city is spending a billion dollars to push people around and throw away their belongings…”
Great job on sticking to the Stranger’s messaging, facts be damned. The city has spent a fraction of its homeless budget on ending unlicensed private appropriations of the city’s shared public spaces. Most of it has gone to feed the Homeless-Industrial Complex, which sprang up when private service providers understood a Council dominated by Progressives lacked both interest and ability in supervising expenditures of public funds.
@61: Only when the risk of incarceration is seen by fentanyl, meth, and heroin addicts will they have the motivation to change course. These people are ruining themselves and our cities, and they have to pay the price of hitting rock bottom.
63 we already incarcerate people for addiction and it doesn’t help but the alternative to narcan is death not jail
64: Death is very effective deterrent.
no it isn’t but your failure to understand the problem has already been noted
How does this guy cressona devote almost all his comments to calling people “right wing influencers” but Aguecheek is in here arguing Dems need to quit complaining and adopt all Trump’s positions in order to win elections and cressona has nothing to say?
And, all you libs whining about “Trump traps” should feel free to call me out each and every time Trump adopts a policy I have explicitly endorsed in the past. Horseshoe Theory says this should be a common occurrence so bring it on!
@52 “the problem with lunatics on the streets is not just the Reagan era defunding of institutions, but also the simultaneous efforts to make civil commitment almost impossible.”
Oh interesting, please elaborate what exactly were the “efforts to make civil commitment almost impossible”
66: Understand what? Do tell me, I’m actually interested in your progressive wisdom.
I’m surprised the far left isn’t upset about Sound Transit installing security cameras to stop the copper wire theft. I figured they’d be shouting “police state” or “late-stage capitalism” or some other nonsense. There’s still time!
68: You should know better my now. That myth is so tired.
In 1980, Jimmy Carter signed the Mental Health Systems Act of 1980. It provided federal grants to local community mental health centers. But it was repealed in 1981 the next year with a Dem majority in both houses and signed by Ronald Reagan who agreed that it was better to allow the states to retain control of funding and operations in mental health institutions.
What Ronnie did do, as governor of California, was to sign the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act in 1972. That bipartisan legislation made mandatory institutionalization of mental health patients by family members and civil courts illegal. That way a bad judge or vindictive relative couldn’t have you locked up indefinitely at a state hospital.
The result of that humanitarian legislation was that populations in state hospitals dropped, but Reagan didn’t directly oversee, direct or cause any hospital closures.
@69, Is your scroll bar broken? If you haven’t figured it out by now explaining it to you one more time isn’t going to help
72: Such a cute out, as always. When pressed, even nicely, you get flustered.
@73, I’m not asking you to agree with me, I am only explaining my point. I don’t care if you think I’m wrong because I know for a fact you are.
You are arguing from a perspective of what you believe should be true, eg the risk of death should be a deterrence or that we should forcibly treat addicts without considering the cost or legal ramifications, but i am arguing from known facts in the world we live in: fear of death does not deter addicts and we do not have the funding nor the will to spend taxpayer dollars treating addicts and homeless people.
The world you want is lovely, i don’t disagree, it’s just not realistic.
@71 “the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act … made mandatory institutionalization of mental health patients by family members and civil courts illegal.”
That’s not quite true, it just established formal court procedures for involuntary commitment in California. More important was the 1975 Supreme Court case O’Connor v. Donaldson which held that people who are not a danger to themselves or others, and who can provide for their own activities of daily living, cannot constitutionally be involuntarily committed. After that ruling every state had to adopt procedures similar to California’s. In this state, contrary to Aguecheek’s assertion, the procedures have been basically the same since the 70s.
And the repeal of the MHSA is another good example of Democrats capitulating to a Republican President to everyone’s detriment.
75: Can you think of any other times when the democrats with a majority in both chambers voted against their own interests to “capitulate” to republicans?
The issue isn’t the cost of narcan per dose, its the efficacy. Reviving someone today so they can die of exposure or health complications from addiction in the future is not solving anything, its just kicking the can down the road.
It may be that those revived with narcan have higher rates of entering and completing drug treatment than those who don’t. We need to study data and find out. If all we did was delay the inevitable with Narcan, then lets pool all of the cost of those $20 doses, and apply it to what has the highest rate of getting the most addicts into recovery so the addict dies of old age.
@77 “then lets pool all of the cost of those $20 doses, and apply it to what has the highest rate of getting the most addicts into recovery”
Now do incarceration
@76 the Dems only had one house at that point, so the first comparable example that comes to mind is the Iraq war authorization in 03
@76, @77, @78
My God.
Narcan sounds like a torture straight out of Tartarus.
Someone overdoses.
They are about to die.
They are revived by Narcan.
They are released to continue to ingest the narcotic of their choice.
They overdose.
They are revived by Narcan.
They are released to continue to ingest the narcotic of their choice.
They overdose…..
My god even Zeus would blanch at that punishment.
Why are the harm reduction folks so nonchalant about the pain that they inflict?
@45: “I mean I wouldn’t put it that way…”
So, put it the way you prefer. Tell us your policy proposal.
Do circumstances exist where involuntary treatment is an option for your program, or does the addict just follow the cycles described @79 (with possible thefts and assaults to obtain drugs, and/or money for drugs, during the active phase of each cycle) until either enough crimes have been committed to put the addict behind bars, or the addict doesn’t get narcan quickly enough this time, and then dies from a long-expected overdose?
@29 Except for the entire show they did last year about the word you mean? https://www.npr.org/programs/ted-radio-hour/2024/05/24/They-Them-LatinX-Rigged-history
@80 “Do circumstances exist where involuntary treatment is an option”
If they are a danger to themselves or others, or cannot provide for their ADLs, sure. Just for being addicted? Obviously not, this isn’t Russia or China.
I do give you two credit for owning up to your authoritarian beliefs–unlike Buddhamat–but I would have thought realizing you are in complete agreement with Trump on this issue would have led to some soul searching on your parts.
@82: How many times need the addict undergo the cycle @79 before “danger to self,” has been satisfied? Ten? Five? Three? One?
Does “danger to self or others,” include thefts and assaults upon others for drugs, or for money to buy drugs? That’s not “just being addicted,” those are actual crimes, whether the perpetrator is addicted or not.
@83 you’re all over the place, come back when you have any idea what you’re talking about
@84: Pathetically weak, especially by the standards of dodging you’ve long established here.
How many near-fatal overdoses must a homeless addict experience before you’ll declare him a “danger to self,” and agree involuntary commitment to treatment may be the only way to save his life? Give us a number, please.
Nothing like the Brent Stirton / Getty Images photo to perfectly illustrate batshit MAGA stupidity and the promotion of global terrorism. It’s nothing to cheer about. No wonder the world hates the Divided States so much.
@34 Phoebe in Wallingford: Did you just hit your head on a rock, Phoebe? PLEASE do NOT put me in the same abysmal category with MAGAs, even in jest!
@85 “How many near-fatal overdoses must a homeless addict experience before you’ll declare him a “danger to self,”
The same as the number of non-fatal crashes before a driver gets involuntarily committed, or non-fatal heart attacks before an overweight person does.
@88: Yes! Now, that’s exactly the high quality of a dodge we’ve come to expect from you: an obfuscating and evasive non-answer, which nonetheless initially and superficially appears to be a clever, meaningful retort. Your years of needing to run very far and oh-so fast from your own statements have, at last, served you well.
Alas, it’s too late for you. What did Mr. Trump want, again? Oh, yes: “…to find ways to make it easier to forcibly hospitalize homeless people with mental illness and addiction for longer periods…”
Well, taking addicts who have already nearly died from overdoses, and saying they are a “danger to themselves or others,” would fit that bill perfectly! Bravo! No one could argue with a demand to “forcibly hospitalize” such persons. President Donald J. Trump thanks you for your public support of his stated policy.