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South King County and South Seattle Have Much Higher Positivity Rates Than the North: Seattle Times's Gene Balk has examined recent King County COVID-19 testing data and found that racially diverse districts have much higher positivity rates than predominately white ones. For example, Ballard, which is 85 white, has a 2.5% positivity rate. But SeaTac (a minority majority city) and Burien (which is 55 percent white) have a combined positivity rate of nearly 20%. Sure, it's nothing like the Dakotas, where rates are close to or have surpassed 60%, but 20% means it's only going to get much worse before it gets any better. Balk found that "after SeaTac/Tukwila, the highest positive test rates were in the Federal Way/Central Military Road (16.8%) and North Highline (15.4%)." The area of my neighborhood, Columbia City, is at 10%.

Is There a Racial Factor In All of This? The average medium income in SeaTac is $59,000. It is $93,000 in Ballard. What this suggests is that the percentage of people working at home in Ballard is higher than that of SeaTac. The former is a working-class district, and working-class people often work with and for lots of people (shopping centers, transportation, and so on). But what about Burien? The whiter city has almost the same medium average income as SeaTac, and so we can attribute some of the high positivity rates there to class (and class in the US has a significant racial dimension). But Burien is also more Trumpy than Ballard. And being Trumpy means expressing your American freedoms by not wearing a mask.

No One Is Running The US Right Now: 2000 dead Americans yesterday. 80,000 fighting for their lives in hospitals. Biden is blocked from the transition process. And Trump, who "stepped away from actively managing the [pandemic] and has not attended a White House coronavirus task force meeting in five months," is too busy trying to steal the election.

Popular Vote? Biden's lead has grown to six million votes. That's about the population of the red state of Missouri, which has 10 electoral votes. Even Trump's tribe of lawyers describes this magnitude as a landslide; but for them, the surplus votes, exactly 6 million, went to Trump, not Biden. In this other universe, an algorithm designed by some anonymous leftist computer programmers captured Trump's popular victory and transferred it to Biden, Antifa's main man and master. Fox's Tucker Carlson so desperately wants to believe in this other story and expose these subterranean programmers. He also believes in UFOs. People have seen them, he says. And so, all he needs from Trump's lawyers is to see just a shred of evidence. Can they give him that?

I Wish I Could Send: The above Slog AM entry back in time. And it doesn't have to be the distant past. 2010 will do fine. A person at the end of the first decade of the new century would read it and think I had gone batty. And yet not a single line in that entry was pulled from thin air.

Not Even Fox News Is Having It:

And, yes: I too think the Minnesota/Michigan mix-up was done on purpose. Trump's lawyers know very well that the basic Trumper will never learn about this "error." The damage is done. Donnie won the election by a landslide.

But Fox Is Still On Wack: Geraldo is now talking about naming the vaccine after Trump. This, he believes, might make the worst loser in presidential history a touch happier.

Florida Sen. Rick Scott: Has the disease. This news will certainly be a bummer for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who wants the senators of the Trump Party to stay healthy for his big "lame-duck agenda," which is, of course, pumping more nutty judges into the US's judicial system.

What Many Americans Have Discovered During the Long and Exhausting Trump/McConnell Reign Is: That much of its political system is composed of traditions or customs rather than laws or hard rules. Bloomberg reports that "Senate Republicans are racing ahead with post-election judicial confirmations, breaking a 123-year tradition against voting on judicial nominees of an outgoing president of the defeated party during a lame duck session."

There's Always Never Enough Money When It Comes Down to People of Color: Trump Party Councilmember Reagan Dunn voted against making Juneteenth and Indigenous Peoples’ Day paid holidays for the county’s 15,000 employees because it would cost too much (10 million bones). Nevertheless, King County Council approved the new holidays.

Millions of Americans Might Lose their unemployment benefits on Boxing Day. Yes, the day after we celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ.

My Tweet of the Week:

Seahawks: Finally won a game.

The Seattle City Council: Vaporized "a proposal intended to stop the Police Department from hiring more than 100 officers next year." One might say the council's honeymoon with the Black Lives Matter movement is officially over.

Some Ballard Business Owners: Got lots of stories to tell about how their community is just falling apart by the day, by the hour, by the minute. Crime is up. Dumping is up. Doing all manner of no good is way up. One owner of a Ballard business even said she has not noticed an uptick in crime personally but is certain that invisible problems are becoming ever more visible.

A Part of Me Wants to Live in This Part of Frosty Alaska Until Around the Time of Joe Biden's Inauguration. This is where one should spend the remaining 60 days of Trump's mad/maddening world. Darkish mornings. Dusky afternoons. Long dark nights. Howling winds and wolves. Time-frozen trees. No sun until Trump is done and gone. Utqiagvik, Alaska, I'm feeling you.