You have you 60 days until election hell is over.
You have you 60 days until election hell is over. Lester Black

Tim Burgess makes $80,000 after sharing mayoral photo: Last month I wrote about former interim Mayor Tim Burgess using a photo of him in the mayor's office on the seventh floor of City Hall to fundraise for his Super PAC, People for Seattle (POS). Well, it turns out his plea for cash worked. People for Seattle raised $80,925 since he sent out the fundraising e-mail, with an average donation of about $1,500 during this latest campaign stretch. That brings the PAC's total fundraising haul to $419,105, according to the Public Disclosure Commission. I would ask Burgess why he thinks it's good for local democracy for a politician to use his former mayoral position as a way to raise nearly half a million dollars in unaccountable Super PAC money, but Burgess continues to decline interview requests.

Here's the e-mail he sent out before raising $80,925 in less than a month.

Lame ducks gonna lame duck: This technically isn't election news, but the city council returned from their August recess this week and didn’t waste any time moving legislation forward. On Tuesday the council passed an ordinance requiring the city to build bike lanes during all major paving projects if a bike lane was planned for the road. Council Member Mike O’Brien introduced legislation that would ban natural gas from being installed in new constructions starting next summer in an attempt to reduce the city’s carbon emissions. And O’Brien teamed up with Council Member Abel Pacheco to introduce legislation that would speed up the environmental review process for land use matters like zoning changes, backyard cottages, and bike lanes.

Oh, and Council Member Teresa Mosqueda wants to turn Pike/Pine on Capitol Hill into Barcelona. The plan, which she says is not a plan but an idea that may become a plan sometime in 2020, would set up temporary car-blocking barriers in the heart of Cap Hill. SDOT already studied a similar idea back in 2015 and people fucking loved it because getting cars off Pike/Pine just makes sense, and anything we can do to make Seattle more like Barcelona is a good thing. If Barcelona ran for mayor next year, then I’d vote for them.

Robert Reich đź’–s Andrew Lewis: Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich came out to Belltown's Labor Temple and endorsed D7 candidate Andrew Lewis on Monday, saying "Andrew lewis was one my students, one of my best students," according to a King 5 interview. Lewis has earned strong labor support in this election, getting a $150,000 ad buy from a national labor Super PAC and the support of the MLK Labor Council. As much as labor clearly likes Lewis, they may have some reasons not to like Lewis's opponent, Jim Pugel. Pugel is a veteran SPD cop and a one-time interim Police Chief who has drawn the ire of the city's police unions for working on police reform. SPD's largest police union is a powerful force on the labor council.

Here's the King 5 interview:

Google displayed "dark ads" to 6.2 million Spokanites: Google said it would stop selling political ads in Washington state after a lawsuit, prompted by reporting from The Stranger's Eli Sanders, initiated by the attorney general found that Google was not complying with the state's political disclosure rules. Yet Google is breaking its own ban and selling thousands of dollars in ads while still not complying with the state's ad rules.

Eli's latest story looks at a Spokane election in February. Less than 40,000 people voted, and yet Google displayed 'dark ads' over 6.2 million times in support of a ballot measure. These ads are called 'dark ads' because instead of being shown to everyone on the platform (like a TV ad) Google targets one specific group. Google is required to catalog all of these ads so concerned citizens can see what is being advertised, but by failing to disclose these ads Google is creating a big accountability problem, as Eli explains:

While old-school political ads delivered over local television and radio stations reach a mass audience, thereby making it easy for fact-checkers and concerned citizens to spot false and misleading spots and then sound the alarm, and while traditional newspaper ads and direct mail pieces leave a literal paper trail, targeted digital ads appear on the screens of their intended audience (an audience that can be as small or as large as the purchaser desires) and then disappear, often with no one outside the target group aware they ever existed.

Shaun Scott & Alex Pedersen Vs. Everyone: D4 candidates Shaun Scott and Alex Pedersen attended an interesting forum yesterday where they faced each other and their former opponents. Cathy Tuttle, Emily Myers, Heidi Stuber, and Sasha Anderson, questioned the two candidates now advancing to the general election. You can see a livestream on Cathy Tuttle's Facebook page here.

The former opponents took the opportunity to ask Pedersen, who seems obsessed with talking about "accountability and transparency," why he deleted a blog on which he argued against Sound Transit 3. Pedersen said he didn't want to have his campaign pay for hosting the blog, and because: "You know, I wrote a lot of stuff, it’s a blog. I wrote stuff on the fly. It really wasn’t as a council candidate where I wanted to first listen to everybody and find out what they want."

As someone who has written around 30,000 words a month for the last year and at one time wrote a blog post titled "I Admit It: I Do Not Lower the Office Toilet Seat," I can sympathize with his "I wrote a lot of stuff" comment, but at the same time... you won't find me arguing against massive transit projects that are our only hope for saving the climate.

Doerr wants to clean up the county: King County Council candidate Abigail Doerr has a plan to turn King County green faster by making the county's entire fleet of cars carbon-neutral and by requiring new buildings in unincorporated parts of the county be built green. You can read more about her plan in this Seattle Times story.

Happy belated birthday, Port of Seattle! Seattle's deepwater port was handed over to local control 108 years ago yesterday, according to HistoryLink. Seattle residents voted on Sep. 5, 1911 to take control of the port away from the railroad and shipping companies and give it to the people, forming a commission governed by three commissioners independent of the city, county, and state governments. You should celebrate the port's birthday by learning more about how the biggest carbon-emitter in the city operates. And then this November you should go vote in the Port Commissioner races like the Stranger Election Control Board told you to.