Republicans need a pro life justice on the bench to overturn roe v wade because all babies deserve the right to grow up and later be killed by Republican policies as adults.

@ 1,

Republinazis want all those babies to die from a bullet through the head in a school shooting--just like Jayzus wants--and they'll murder every last mutherfucking one of us if that's what it takes.

Pedersen called it [the Seattle Police Officers Guild contract!] 'the chief roadblock' in the way of the systemic change the council is trying to accomplish."

The 'thin blue line' cum police 'unions' allows shit that should never occur to blossom -- like that flower that seldom blooms but when it does, smells like Death -- and costs the taxpayers how many hundreds of Million$ -- each and every year in (secret?) settlements?

Protecting the unforgivable should Never be allowed.

Just say NO to police 'unions.'

"However, as several council members pointed out, the council cannot dictate if or how the mayor spends the allocated funds: She could simply... not spend the money as directed."

(Ellipsis in the original.)

This is a hollow victory for the Council, and the CM's admission contradicts The Stranger's earlier reporting, "...Durkan—who has no more cards to play after using her veto..." (https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2020/09/22/44849628/will-council-members-vote-against-their-own-budget-to-save-face)

Packing the Council Chambers with Sawant supporters is a very old (and very tired) trick, and should have been discredited after the EHT repeal, which saw (and heard) those supporters screaming obscenities and threats against Council Members as they voted.

Recalling CM Sawant for her illegal and unethical behaviors should help put a stop to these harmful theatrics.

I guess I will call and thank my CM for voting to override, since I called to urge them to do so this morning.

Police unions are no different than most others .... Protecting the bad apples.

More jobs for Bellevue, yay!

@1 Brent Gumbo, @2 Original Andrew, and @3 kristofarian: I feel sick for women and adolescent girls of reproductive age everywhere under the current Trumpty Dumpty neofascist regime. My recent bilateral hysterectomy (i.e.: surgically induced menopause), resolving a long history of horrible internal health problems didn't come a moment too soon. I cannot imagine how my life would have been like now if I had ever had children.

Why do I now envision scenes from The Exorcist (1973) from that Durkan defund image?

The most important result of this is that the nav team will be defunded. Thus guaranteeing that encampments will remain a permanent feature of our city's parks and public spaces until we replace the current council with a more sane group of people. Enjoy, Seattle! This is what you voted for (if you took The Stranger's recommendations).

Gonzalez got into a fight with Sawant today. Seems like she's had enough of the constant bullying, degrading, and insults. Hey dummy, maybe you shouldn't have endorsed her? Like your city, you get what you pay for.

Almost all the councilmembers were annoying but I want to call out these few in particular:

Dan Strauss seemed like he was specifically out to aggravate and needle Jenny Durkan. His entire speech was full of passive-aggressive digs at her and her office, including calling her veto a "political game" and blaming her for not calling him enough. It was all so immature and petty. Especially because Strauss is NOTORIOUS for NEVER responding to constituent e-mails. What a loser.

Theresa Mosqueda was obnoxiously self-congratulatory. She really wants to sell everyone on the idea that these budget cuts are the new civil rights movement and she's the new Lyndon Johnson getting MLK's legislation through Congress. And she just went on and on and on. She must have spent the last week burning the midnight oil in search of new platitudes to write about how great she is and how great this work is. It's so obvious that she's running for mayor and wants to bill this as some huge civil rights accomplishment.

Lisa Herbold set out to tear apart the mayor's compromise plan, but her entire speech was "the mayor's plan doesn't do exactly what I want with exactly the numbers that I want, so it's AWFUL." Hey Lisa, that's what a COMPROMISE is. You don't get what you want! Instead Lisa decided she wanted to take everything and give the mayor nothing, and then ended her speech with 5 minutes of "we um hope um that um this um can um be um the um start um of um a um bright um new um collaborative um future um with um the um mayor. We um should um be um able um to um work um together."

And of course The Stranger's favorite councilmember, Kshama Sawant, was there to tell us that the mayor's compromise budget was "a declaration of war against black people and the Black Lives Matter movement."

In conclusion: To all of you who voted these losers into office.... way to go, idiots! Now you're getting what you wanted, and you get to see what your city looks like run by activists and morons who don't know the first thing about municipal policy. Only four more years to go until we can vote them out!

well, all except one...
www.recallsawant2020.org

The Seattle City Council (except two) are horrible people.

@6 -- yeah, 'cept Po-po 'unions' are
protecting Bad Apples WHO HAVE
THE RIGHT TO KILL YOU whilst
their compatriots look on in
abject Horror and know
they Gotta Keep Silent
or Else... .

Not quite the Plumber's Union, I'm guessing.

Its a wonder to me that people will swallow without flinching a bureaucratic bullshit line like "$407,407,066 is the exact, correct amount of money for police but $366,666,360 is wholly inadequate". As if this quantity has been derived science and not as the arbitrary result of result of a chain of contingency.

No civil servant is going to tell you they can make do with less money. That's just in their nature. That's why these decisions are the responsibility of democratically accountable politicians.

@17: CM Herbold sought re-election by citing her work to increase funding for the SPD. Ever since her re-election, she's been (incompetently) attempting to defund SPD. It's not a matter of her constituency swallowing a bureaucratic line, it's her constituency wanting her to do what she said she'd do. (Given her insistence upon eliminating the Navigation Team, she's actually made the case for MORE funds for SPD, since encampment sweeps will now be done by the SPD, not social services.)

@12: "Gonzalez got into a fight with Sawant today. Seems like she's had enough of the constant bullying, degrading, and insults. Hey dummy, maybe you shouldn't have endorsed her? Like your city, you get what you pay for."

Yeah, it's almost like giving into a bully will simply buy you more bullying. How anyone reached a position of leadership without learning that must forever remain a mystery-- to us adults, anyway.

As I wrote, this is a hollow victory for the Council. They can eliminate funds for the Navigation Team, but they can't actually force the Mayor to spend any funds they've provided in the manner they want.

So that giant anime robot is cool and all, but you did notice that it moved reeeealy slow and that was at 4x fast forward right?
I'm not worried (or hoping) for the meca-apocolypse just yet.

Definitely did not expect the council to stand up to jenny, nice to see it though. I don't know why this was made into a big deal though since from what I read the vote is non-binding. You guys worried about the homeless encampments, do you really enjoy spending taxes on sweeping people from one place to the next? If you want to see fewer homeless then tax the rich and the corporations, do something about income inequality. The amount of homeless people in Seattle has skyrocketed with the explosion of amazon, etc. In fact, we spend so much on cops that it actually contributes to the our homelessness situation because we can't afford to fund actual solutions. Clearly jenny is alright with that though, so if you want more homeless people keep voting for her.

@21: Do you really enjoy spending taxes on sweeping people from one place to the next?

No, but that's the only thing that's working in trying to keep our city safe. Far more effective than pushing tech jobs out of Seattle with some elusive tax revenue that would never address the situation with any relief whatsoever but just build more apartment buildings the homeless can't afford anyway.

defunding the nav team will have no impact on the frequency of sweeps. what will change is they will no longer offer outreach or services as part of the process. the police will simply provide notice as required and then move in and sweep camps that are declared a hazard. @21 what you fail to address is that people aren't going to change if we continually make them too comfortable. Sleeping on the street or in a park should not be an option and after they are tired of getting swept for the 3rd, 4th, 8th time maybe then they will accept services or go back to whatever place they came from to rebuild their lives.

@20,

I don't understand why robot designers seem so insistnet on prototypes in "human" form (with a head, all the standard appendages, etc.) I've always thought part of what makes robotics so cool is the capability of machines to perform human functions in decidedly non-human manifestation. I'm assuming it's because there's an aesthetic (or even, ugh, "cute") element to them which is probably desirable to the masses, but this could very well also compromise their efficiency and functionality.

Or I dunno, maybe designers are assuming this'll give us a fighting chance when they inevitably turn against us. Pretty cool, regardless.

In this city, a mayor can be removed. If Mayor Durkan refuses to execute the laws enacted by the City Council, that's a canonical abuse of power, and she should be removed.

@26 It's amazing what ideology can do to people's sense of ordinary caution. It can make them, as a matter of "high principle" crowd together at parties and dispense with any sense of duty to their fellow-citizens. If this country falls, it will be conservatives that brought it to ruin.

@25: The Council is not a Directorate. The Mayor has discretion over how to spend the funds the Council has appropriated.

Council Members can be removed as well, and there is a recall petition just certified to do that.

So we're all cool with paying $120 per person per year to have cops hand out business cards? Sounds like a deal!

Bars open after 10 and weddings/funerals are the top three plague spreaders.

Just say no.

@30:

And yet the states where COVID cases are soaring RIGHT NOW are all red ones, how do you explain that away?

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/09/01/816707182/map-tracking-the-spread-of-the-coronavirus-in-the-u-s

https://www.healthline.com/health-news/here-are-the-states-where-covid-19-is-increasing#Where-cases-are-the-highest

For those of you complaining about the tents in park and under the freeway, take a good look at a homeless encampment and say to yourself, "There, but for the Grace of God, go I." Because that is where you will be when you get caught up in the gears of the US economy. Go ahead, tell yourself it won't happen to you. Tell yourself you're too smart for that, or that you've planned too well for that to happen to you.

One cancer diagnosis. One layoff. One accident. That's all it takes.

Have a little sympathy. Try being human. The cops aren't the answer to every societal issue you don't like.

@26:

Yeah, I actually agree with you about the fear thing. Like how all these RWNJ's are running around screaming how nobody can make them wear a mask, because they're not afraid of anything - while arming themselves to the teeth and wearing more body armor than active infantry.

@33:

I always figure the people who complain the most about the state of homeless encampments are the same ones who probably have pathways excavated through all the crap inside their own homes, not to mention back yards that look like they're aspiring to make it big in the junkyard business. But, it's not visible, so it doesn't count.

@35:
It stuns me that anyone can look on human misery like that and rather than feel sympathy for those suffering they want to call a bulldozer because it's unsightly.

@33: If by "grace of God," you meant "substance abuse and mental health issues," then you were correct. Otherwise, your economic explanation fails to tell us why we had an increasing population of homeless when our economy was expanding.

@35: We do feel sympathy, which is why we spend over $100M per year on homeless issues. We had also funded a Navigation Team to offer services to the homeless, but every time a camp was swept, a minority of the campers accepted our aid. Now that our City Council has voted, very clearly, to eliminate the Navigation Team, the police will sweep the encampments. If you have a problem with that, please take it to our Council -- once they're done high-fiving with each other and The Stranger about elimination of the Navigation Team.

Encampments have to be swept because they are a public-health hazard, not because our precious sense of aesthetics have been offended.

@37

Economic expansion? LOL! For whom, brother? Wall Street did great! Main Street? Not so much. If you think the US economy is working well for anyone outside the 1% you're deluding yourself. See you in the soup line!

Did Nathalie forget to mention that Lisa Herbold also voted to override the veto when she listed the roll call?

@38: The unemployment rate in the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue area dropped from 10% in early 2010 to 3.1% in early 2020, just before COVID-19 hit. The decline was continuous over that time. (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SEAT653UR) Over that very same decade, the number of homeless persons in Seattle rose. So again, our homeless population didn't get that way from loss of jobs here.

What our homeless population did do was arrive here already homeless, and using drugs. In the 2016 survey, (http://coshumaninterests-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/City-of-Seattle-Report-FINAL-with-4.11.17-additions.pdf), 68.7% of the homeless said they were not from Seattle, a majority said Seattle was not the place they most recently became homeless, and a majority reported using alcohol or other drugs.

Our attempt to treat an influx of already-homeless drug users as if they were just down-on-their-luck locals has created what we have today: expensive failure, a homeless-industrial complex which exists to perpetuate itself at taxpayer expense, illegal encampments across the city (many featuring piles of parts from stolen bicycles), and needless, preventable deaths of the homeless themselves (https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2020/09/17/44486928/slog-am-two-found-found-dead-in-cal-anderson-barr-explored-charging-durkan-for-chop-obama-to-drop-new-memoir). A study in sympathy or empathy, it is not.

I though a bunch of dudes roaming the streets with guns was called a gang.