Data the office normally publishes annual was due to the council in March. Its May.
Data the office should have readily available was due to the council in March. It's May, and the data is nowhere to be found.

Well, that was quick: Apparently desperate to remind people that his state isn’t just some vestigial appendage dangling off of Texas’ backside, Oklahoma’s governor signed a “Texas-style” ban on most abortions yesterday, ABC reports. In commenting on the bill, Gov. Kevin Stitt crowed that he wants Oklahoma to be “the most pro-life state” in the country. No word on whether they’ll consider investing in prenatal care, child-care for low-income families, additional welfare benefits for women forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term, or additional counseling resources for people having a mental breakdown at the realization that life can somehow get worse as a poor person in Oklahoma.

A final bit of political theater criticism before we move on to other news: Local Democratic leaders, we need to have an intervention on the compulsion we’ve developed to turn everything into a “rally” after the Trump era. I get it, it’s a muscle that got plenty of use these last few years. And I know, Kerry Park is a great backdrop for TV shots. But don’t call an event you’re holding miles from mass transit at 2:30 pm in the afternoon a “rally.” It’s a press conference – which is what it should be! You’re not regular people whose only means of registering objection with the Supreme Court is to pour into the streets in protest. You’ve already done the work to protect abortion access in our state (though you could do a little more to put your money where your mouth is), so just say that for the TV cameras, and if you absolutely need people surrounding you for the visual, you have staff for that.

This is what a rally looks like:

Are we sure this old lady wasn’t just cold? Cops are the same the world over. A 72-year-old French woman was found to have stolen a jacket on display as an art exhibit at the Musée Picasso when she returned to the museum wearing the jacket after having it tailored several days later.

Never change, Seattle: I don’t care how much it apparently annoys people who work in fashion, this is the only city I’ve ever lived in with a rational relationship to clothing in a professional setting. The planet is dying (more on that in a second), COVID is surging (again), and you want to talk to me about slowly strangling all day in an office with a silk noose wrapped around my neck? Absolutely not. Keep wearing whatever you want, fellow yoga pants enthusiasts. Oh, and perhaps this can be a moment to pause and reflect on the absurd number of ways women in the workplace are pressured to inflict misery on themselves for the sake of social acceptance. That’d be nice.

I’m so exhausted: And not just because this is my first time getting up at 5 am to make sure you get your daily dose of Slog on time, dear readers. Drought conditions in the West are getting so bad that the feds are holding back water from the Colorado River so one dam can keep generating power, according to CNBC. Forty million people are dependent on the Colorado River Basin, but I’m sure any of them wringing their hands this morning over the complete lack of action on any federal climate legislation will be comforted by Joe Manchin’s commitment to becoming the most reviled Democratic Senator of our generation.

Good luck, zoomers: A new report published in the Journal of Geophysical Research Earth Surface says most glaciers on the Olympic Peninsula will largely disappear by 2070. Seattle Times climate reporter Nicholas Turner has the details, including a refreshingly blunt kicker from Washington State Climatologist Nick Bond: “I don’t see any way to save the glaciers unless we begin to eliminate fossil fuels[.]”

May the 4th be with you in your quest to distract yourself from our impending doom: Content Daddy Disney is here with a new trailer for the latest Star Wars toy advertisement disguised as television.

City Attorney Ann Davison is late on her first homework assignment: After her election last November, the outgoing Council passed a new law requiring the City Attorney’s Office to disclose data on how it is using various diversion programs as a condition to granting Davison a 9% increase to her office’s budget. Part of that money was allocated to funding a full time Data Analytics Manager, so it’s not as if this is an unreasonable request or an unfunded mandate. The first report was due to the Council by the end of Q1, also known as March for those not in the financial sector. However, in a phone interview on Monday, CAO spokesperson Anthony Derrick confirmed to me that the office has yet to produce the data it’s required to under the new law.

So, why are they late? Well, Derrick claims that there was no system in place when Davison took office to collect and then report out the data the Council wants. But he also said that their predecessor, Pete Holmes, used to produce this sort of data upon request on an annual basis, so it’s not entirely clear what the hold up is on simply reporting the same categories of data more frequently.

Personally, I’m skeptical: It’s not that I’m constitutionally incapable of giving a Republican the benefit of the doubt, it’s that the available information doesn’t seem to merit it in this case. Davison used the Data Analytics Manager funding to hire her campaign spokesperson/policy advisor, Per-Olaf Swanson, for the position responsible for overseeing this data collection, despite the fact that he has only worked for Davison for the past three straight years she’s run for office, according to his resume on LinkedIn. Further, according to the City Attorney’s own organizational chart, Swanson reports directly to Scott Lindsay of “Seattle is Dying” infamy. But Swanson’s a grad of UW’s Evans School, so, hey, maybe he just needs a few months in his first job handling government data to get his feet under him.

So that’s why my flight was canceled: I recently made the mistake of traveling to the east coast for the weekend to attend a wedding, and I unknowingly joined thousands of passengers in confused outrage upon arriving at SeaTac to discover Alaska had summarily canceled my flight without explanation. The cause? An ongoing labor dispute with their pilots over their next contract that’s leading to staffing issues. That conflict will now drag into its second month, according to the Seattle Times.

This is *not* legal advice, but: Your phone can’t snitch on you to the abortion police if you don’t store potentially incriminating data on it in the first place:

Not every conspiracy theory is made up: If you’re not already familiar with the story of the Cointelpro program, get yourself some history. It will sound like something straight out of the latest Q drop, except many of the stories of abuse by the FBI and many other big-city police departments in the civil rights era are backed up by documents that family members of murdered activists fought for decades in court to get disclosed to the public.