This won't be coming soon to a stadium near you.
Do you miss crowds? Getty images

More dadspeak from Gov. Inslee: Trump keeps bullying governors to reopen schools prematurely in the fall and Inslee thinks it's a bunch of "hogwash." Today at a presser, Inslee clarified that "decisions about school and how to have it, onsite or otherwise, will remain with the state of Washington." Is it just me, or does "hogwash" sound kinda hot? I'm probably only thinking this because I miss gay bars.

Come get your refunds: The Seahawks are offering season-ticket holders full refunds for the 2020 season. It's still unclear what will happen to this year's NFL season, although my bet is it's gonna look something like this:

Seattle made the front page of The Indepedent's homepage today, but not for reasons we should be proud of:

The top story on The Independents homepage this afternoon.
The top story on The Independent's homepage this afternoon.

In a lengthy and damning feature, The Independent’s Chief US Correspondent Andrew Buncombe writes about how he was "arrested, jailed, and assaulted" by SPD while covering CHOP. An excerpt from the piece:

At the precinct, I again informed people I was a journalist, and asked to call my lawyer, my editor and the British embassy. I asked them to contact my local congresswoman. They took my photograph and told me I was being charged with “failure to disperse”, a Seattle municipal code that requires the accused to have been part of a group of four or more. I had been standing by myself.

The maximum penalty is 364 days in jail and a fine of $5,000. Journalists are largely exempt from the law. "No such order shall apply to a news reporter or other person observing or recording the events on behalf of the public press or other news media, unless he is physically obstructing lawful efforts by such officer to disperse the group," says the code.

After an hour in a holding cell, the handcuffs still on, somebody again put leg irons around my ankles, and connected the two with a piece of chain pulled tight around my stomach. Were we heading to Guantanamo Bay? A woman also under arrest kept saying she did not speak English and requested a Navajo translator. “I think you speak English just fine,” mocked one officer.

In the van, the woman insisted on lying lengthways in the compartment she was in. I was squeezed into a tiny, claustrophobic section, perched on a narrow bench, trying not to slip off as the van sped through the city’s boarded-up downtown, towards the jail. By this point, the so-called “belly chain” had become so tight I could not fully exhale. It felt obscene and preposterous to have to inform the officers I could not properly breathe, that phrase having become weighted with such power and resonance during the Black Lives Matter movement, echoing the gut-wrenching final words of George Floyd. But that was the situation. I could not properly breathe.

One of the officers responded: “If you can speak, you can breathe.”

Read the whole thing here.

What the fucking fuck: Video shows Yakima cop forcing K-9 dog to bite pinned-down suspect

Four members of Seattle City Council support defunding SPD by 50% and even more have said they support some reductions, notes Jake Goldstein-Street for Capitol Hill Seattle Blog's overview of yesterday's budget committee meeting. One of those four member is Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda, the chair of the budget committee. The council will hold a final vote on changes to the city's budget on July 20.

The Council expressed strong support for moving 911 out of SPD control: “911 calls should be referred, whenever appropriate, to non-police responders," said a representative from Decriminalize Seattle to the Council yesterday. "Councilmember Andrew Lewis expressed 'very strong support' for the idea, which Councilmember Dan Strauss characterized as a potential 'quick win,'" noted Daniel Beekman at the Seattle Times.

This is bleak: Glee actress Naya Rivera is now presumed dead. She disappeared yesterday while boating on Lake Piru with her four-year-old son, who is alive and healthy. A spokesman for the Ventura County Sheriff's Office said that they went swimming and that Rivera did not return to the boat. Rivera's son was wearing a life vest but she was not. More than 80 people are conducting a recovery operation and the lake has been closed.

The other night while lying in bed thinking about COVID-19, my brain did the fun exercise of wondering what would happen if Cascadia's Big One decided to strike Seattle right now. I don't know why I did this, considering I'm irrationally afraid of earthquakes, but there I was doing it, and here I am recommending Japan Sinks 2020, the new Netflix anime about a cataclysmic megaquake striking Japan. The series, which dropped on the platform today, comes from visionary director and animator Masaaki Yuasa (Mind Game; The Night Is Short, Walk on Girl) and is based on the bestselling 1973 disaster novel of the same name by Sakyo Komatsu. Here's a trailer:

The series is kinda soothing, even though it's about a country sinking into the ocean: Yuasa is known for letting his animators use different, sometimes conflicting visual styles. His contradictory flair is subtle in Japan Sinks 2020, but it's still there and very noticeable in the series' score. Within the opening minutes, Japan literally sinks into the ocean in a burning inferno, but Yuasa underscores the devastation with music that sounds like it comes from a massage playlist. It's a deranged choice that seems right for 2020. I'll tease out that juxtaposition in another post.

Some thoughts on Yuasa's style in the video below. The Night Is Short, Walk on Girl is a good first step into Yuasa's films:

Uncle Joe unveiled a plan to spend $700 billion on American products and research: The move targets Trump's "America First" rhetoric. More from the Washington Post:

Biden’s announcement prompted frustration by some Trump allies that it was released before the president announced a similar “Buy American” proposal that has been held up for months amid internal objections, according to current and former officials. Stephen K. Bannon, a former chief Trump strategist, said the president’s team was “caught flat-footed.”

Biden’s pitch underscores a major shift by both major parties away from embracing globalization and free trade and toward protecting American workers and revitalizing struggling domestic industries. Those trends have been accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic, which has wreaked havoc on the economy.

Over 1,000 TSA members have tested positive for coronavirus: "Nearly all of them are security officers who have continued to work screening passengers at airports throughout the pandemic," notes the Washington Post. Six TSA employees have died.

Meanwhile, in Mississippi: A huge COVID-19 outbreak in their state legislature. At least 26 lawmakers are infected. That's one in seven Mississippi legislators.