Ritzville is all about wheat. Fields of wheat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tt2JVOrAZGU.

The crows are there to pluck the eyes from the carcass of democracy

Tomorrow you can drown your sorrows at the after-party paid for with democracy vouchers.

You mean that if WA had population roughly comparable to FL (at about 21 milliom) our covid deaths would be less than half of FL.

Florida is 8th in terms of deaths per million, at 2,770. Washington is 44th, at 1,145. What is even more striking is that we got the disease early, when treatments were very poor. Florida got its first cases much later. Their biggest spike occurred recently, after the vaccines became available.

I'm not sure why Florida numbers have dropped so quickly. It is possible that they have reached herd immunity the hard way. Lots of people have gotten the disease, and lots of people have been vaccinated. There is also a seasonal effect (more people go outdoors in the fall in Florida). It may also be a swing in behavior, do to the really high numbers just a couple months ago.

@8 -- Oh, we know what works and what doesn't (masks and vaccines). The problem is that people ignore the advice. Then you have the delta variant, which is a lot more contagious.

Anyway, neither Israel nor Iceland have a really high vaccination rate. Relative to the rest of the world it is very good, but it still isn't great. You also have to factor in the number of people who have had the disease in the past. For example, 14% of the people in Israel are known to have contracted Covid. In Iceland it's 4%. This may explain why the numbers in Israel dropped like a stone, while in Iceland they haven't.

Yes, Florida has a lot of older residents. But they rank 8th in both known cases and known deaths. Again, the numbers shot up after the vaccine became available. At a time when lots of older people were getting vaccinated, the disease was spreading faster than ever -- mostly among younger people who didn't bother getting vaccinated, or taking other safety precautions. Florida could have been one of the better states (helped along by its climate, and the fact that a lot of those older folks took this more seriously) but they fucked up, big time.

"If you vote one way (see Seattle Time's endorsements), there will be no distributive peace in view; if you vote another way (see The Stranger's endorsements), there is."

This reads like a Donald Trump tweet. I don't think reducing local politics to a divisive culture war is really helping anyone, Charles. If you want to discuss the merits of the candidate's positions, have at it. But this sort of simplistic, us-versus-them approach is troubling.

Conservatives have a needle and poop fetish.

But Our Dear FriedFriendly has one thing right - more people should get out and see the state. It occurs to me that the problem with Eastern WA is not that the republicans control it - it's that the Democrats have abandoned it. I was looking at the Grant County voters guide, and most positions either go unopposed, or have two mentally ill conservative candidates battling it out for who can be more nihilistic and Jesus-addled.

If you had ever left the I-5 corridor before, you would have encountered Ritzville. It's right off I-90, and signs for it seem like a joke, given the surroundings. It's got a very capable highway rest stop, though it's named after a road/person with the unpleasant surname of Shrag.

Say what you want about Ritzville, but it's as good a place as any to go and die.

One Simple Man, our local paper in Grant County runs a column by Rep. Newhouse almost every week. It's a fairly progressive paper, so I asked the publisher why they never run columns by the Democrats. He said that he has asked Murray/Cantwell/Inslee to send columns, and they won't do it.

So the only political message is Newhouse, and he's nuts. (Although they don't run his more crazy columns)