Good Morning! Today is our last day in the 80s for a while. We’ll slide into the weekend with some perfect Seattle weather in the high 70s, and it’ll last through the first half of next week.
Let’s do the news.
Who Wants to Build Trump’s Fighter Jets Anyway? More than 3,200 machinists in Boeing’s St. Louis-based defense division are threatening to walk off the job on Sunday and halt production of their military planes. Boeing, who totally isn’t worried about their stock prices, reminded Seattle Times readers that this was just a tenth of the size of last year’s strike in the PNW that tanked their productivity. They also want you to know that this won’t affect production of Trump’s vanity project, the F-47, which is their newest defense contract.
Out-of-State PAC Money Rolls into City Council Race: Stranger Staff Writer Nathalie Graham reported yesterday that the National Association of Realtors, a Chicago-based political action committee, already spent nearly $70,000 on mailers for Council President Sara Nelson’s bid to stay on the Seattle City Council. That adds to the more than $400,000 war chest Nelson already has for her campaign to hang onto her council seat. To counter that out-of-state spending, her best competition, Dionne Foster, got some support from Seattle’s progressive PAC, helpfully named Progressive People Power (or P3). As a rule, they don’t get involved until the general, but the Nelson/Foster race got them in the mix early.
Toe-to-Toe: New polling from the Northwest Progressive Institute (NPI) showed Foster four points ahead of Nelson with likely voters, once they were provided the information in the voter pamphlet. Those four points are within the margin of error, so statistically, it’s a tie. But with Nelson’s record-low approval ratings, I’d bet she’s feeling nervous.
Meanwhile, in the other city-wide council seat, NPI polling found that Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck looks likely to win reelection pretty comfortably, despite the Seattle Times’ refusal to endorse in that race because, as they said, while the candidates were “an interesting group of hopefuls” (a sitting council person) and “very nice,” none of them met their criteria for an endorsement (good). It seems like Republican candidate Rachael Savage sees the writing on the wall, so she’s taking her whole campaign message and turning it into a citizen initiative to ban homeless camping in Seattle and force people to choose between treatment and arrest.
The Shield Tax Is Working Its Way Through Council: Yesterday, City Council heard public comment and voted on 17 amendments for the progressive tax code overhaul called the Shield Initiative. Introduced by Councilmember Rinck and Mayor Bruce Harrell, it would eliminate or lower the B&O tax for small businesses, raise the tax for Seattle’s 2,300 highest-grossing companies, and raise $90 million in the process. Public commenters overwhelmingly spoke in support of the bill (the only exceptions being the extremely pro-business Downtown Seattle Association and the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce). A huge number of people working on food access showed up, because under a Trump administration, this initiative could literally be the difference between people eating and not. Council should vote on the full initiative on Monday, just shy of the deadline to get it on the November ballot, and let the people decide.
Nuclear Fusion in Everett? The Everett-based company, Helion, announced that it broke ground on the world’s first nuclear fusion power plant. The only problem? It’s not clear if they’ve actually figured out how to turn fusion into power. Maybe that’s a problem for Future Helion.
Fernando’s Going Home, for Now: Fernando Alves Rocha, the theater manager at Juanita High School in Kirkland, is expected to be released on a $10,000 bond. He’s been in the Northwest ICE Processing Center for nearly two weeks after immigration officers arrested him in his driveway. They claim he overstayed his tourist visa in 2018. His attorney told KUOW that Rocha filed an asylum application a day before his visa expired in 2018, and that he’s had a valid work permit since his asylum application has been pending.
Our Hometown Counterterrorist: Remember when Joe Kent, Trump’s “Young Gun,” was running for Congress in Southern Washington? Well, the former Green Beret and friend to White Supremacists was just confirmed by the Senate as the country’s top counter terrorism official.
Trump’s Tariff Tantrums: The deadline for tariffs to come crashing down on every one of our trade partners is tomorrow, so there’s a lot of tariff news: Trump has escalated the fight with Brazil, raising their tariffs to 50 percent and slapping sanctions on the judge that’s investigating Bolsonaro (because dictators look after their own, sometimes); the Administration settled on a 15 percent tariff rate with South Korea; and countries are agreeing to buy more US fuel than they need just to get Trump off their back. And then there’s Canada. Trump said this morning that it would be “very hard” to make a trade deal with our neighbors to the north if they dared to follow in the UK and France’s footsteps and recognize Palestine’s statehood.
As a reminder, 147 out of 193 UN member states recognize Palestinian statehood. We’re the problem.
Gazans Are Starving and Capitalism Still Rules: Most Gazans depend on aid drops for sustenance at this point, but there are still some operating markets, selling limited produce, pantry staples, and some looted aid package materials. There, a kilo of sugar is more than $100. Baby formula is $51. Let me say that again. Baby formula for starving infants is $51.
This Is Fascism: Another Ivy League university has paid off the Trump administration in exchange for being allowed to exist. Brown University agreed to make $50 million in payments to state workforce development programs over the next 10 years, and said they would comply with the Trump administration’s overall ideology, including bans on transgender athletes participating in collegiate sports. Because our federal government is the mob now?
Uh Oh, I Agree with the NYT Editorial Board: The New York Times editorial board took a shot at the Supreme Court this week, calling them out for their lack of transparency around their rulings about the Trump administration:
Federal judges are not elected by the public. Nor are they supposed to make decisions based on their ideological preferences. Our political system instead vests them with the power to decide whether the president, Congress and other lawmakers are enacting policies that are consistent with previous laws, court rulings and, above all, the Constitution.
For these reasons, the credibility of judges depends on their ability to offer public explanation for the legal basis of their decisions…Clear explanation is especially important for the Supreme Court, which sets national rules that lower courts must follow. When the court fails to make these rules clear, confusion can set in.
The current Supreme Court is creating precisely this problem by issuing many important rulings as brief, unsigned orders on its so-called emergency docket. On this docket (also known as the shadow docket), the votes among the nine justices are not public, and the majorities typically offer little explanation for their decisions. Yet the justices have used the emergency docket this year to hand down a series of rulings allowing President Trump to expand executive power and alter the structure of government.
Preach.
I’ll be at the Death Cab for Cutie anniversary show tonight, and Nation of Language is opening for them. So I’ll ease you into the morning with one of my favorites:
